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https://www.sfexaminer.com/entertainment/sfjazz-pays-tribute-to-the-masters/
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Since 1982, the National Endowment for the Arts has been awarding Jazz Masters fellowships to musicians considered to have reached an “exceptionally high standard of achievement.” Besides the monetary award, the designation is considered one of the highest honors a jazz musician can receive.
The 2022 awards will be celebrated on Thursday with a tribute concert at the SFJazz Center in San Francisco honoring this year’s recipients — bassist Stanley Clarke, drummer Billy Hart, singer Cassandra Wilson and saxophonist/educator Donald Harrison Jr. — and featuring such stars as singer Dianne Reeves (who’s also hosting the show), Jeremiah Collier, Joe Dyson, Ethan Iverson, Dan Kaufman, Salar Nader and more, as well as the SFJazz Collective.
The 7:30 p.m. show is sold out but a late batch of tickets will be sold at the SFJazz Center box office 6-7 p.m. You can also livestream the show on the venue’s website, https://www.sfjazz.org/.
It’s free but registration is required. Meanwhile, the sensational Reeves, a 2018 Jazz Master, will perform at SFJazz Center at 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 7 p.m. Sunday. Tickets are $50-$115. Proof of vaccination is required, and masks must be worn in the theater. Go to https://www.sfjazz.org/.
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20220401
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https://www.sfexaminer.com/findings/big-oil-companies-accused-of-falsely-inflating-gas-prices-in-anti-trust-lawsuit/
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By Joe Dworetzky
Two dozen individual consumers filed a massive lawsuit Monday in federal court in San Francisco alleging an antitrust conspiracy two years ago by big oil companies to curtail worldwide oil production in order to boost the price of gas. The defendants include Exxon Mobile Corporation, the world’s biggest oil company, Chevron Corporation, Phillips 66 Company, Occidental Petroleum, and a number of smaller oil companies.
The case has its roots in March 2020, when an agreement among members of the Organization of Petroleum-Exporting Countries (OPEC) and Russia, the world’s number 3 oil producer, was set to expire. The agreement limited the amount of oil that each of the countries could produce.
Plaintiffs allege that in meetings in Vienna on March 6, Russia declined to renew the production agreement because U.S. oil producers, not a party to the agreement, were expanding production and undercutting Russian prices.
Saudi Arabia is the world’s second largest oil-producing country after the United States. Russia’s position was adverse to Saudi interests. To retaliate against Russia, Saudi Arabia publicly announced that it would boost its production and cut prices.
This led to what the complaint characterizes as “a worldwide price war” and as a result, “prices for oil and gasoline began to drop precipitously.”
At first, then-President Donald J. Trump trumpeted the falling prices, even predicting that a gallon of gas would fall to 99 cents. He described the results as “like giving a massive tax cut to the people of our country.” Trump reportedly said, “The free market is a wonderful thing.”
But if the gas prices were a boon to consumers, the world’s biggest oil companies were not thrilled. The complaint alleges that the American Petroleum Institute (API), a trade association for American oil producers, began to talk publicly about the need for U.S. oil producers to “balance the oil market” in order to stabilize domestic oil prices.
API allegedly arranged a meeting on April 3, 2020 with then President Trump. In attendance were the CEOs of API, Exxon, Chevron and Phillips. David Bernhardt, the United States Secretary Department of Interior, was also present.
The complaint says that after talking to API and the oil companies, President Trump’s attitude toward the falling gas prices “changed dramatically,” and at the request of the defendants he began to lobby to stop the price war.
Plaintiffs allege that Trump spoke directly with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud and urged them to make peace.
Saudi Arabia and Russia allegedly said that in order to call off the price war, the U.S., Canada and Mexico would have to agree cut their production.
Shortly thereafter, the U.S. Secretary of Energy announced that the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (the U.S. government oil storage system) had agreed to store 21.3 million barrels of “excess oil” from U.S. producers, thus essentially taking that supply off the market. Trump allegedly tweeted that there would also be a reduction of U.S. production and the Secretary of Energy later estimated that U.S. production would fall by 2 to 3 million barrels a day.
On April 9, 2020, OPEC and Russia announced an end to the price war and an agreement to cut production. The complaint quotes the CEO of API saying that “strong U.S. diplomacy” had helped to stabilize world oil markets.
The plaintiffs see it differently. They say that the defendants “used the former President of the United States as a facilitator to obtain agreement from Saudi Arabia and Russia to cut oil production, along with the American Defendants.”
Plaintiffs describe the result in dramatic terms, “The American oil companies… agreed to the demands of Saudi Arabia and Russia. The cartel now included the Americans. It was, in effect and fact, OPEC++ (OPEC plus Russia plus America).”
Plaintiffs say that the effect of the agreement was to dramatically increase the price of a barrel of oil from less than $20.00 to over $100.00 per barrel. They also say that the actions “ignite[d] the fire of inflation throughout the country.”
The complaint asserts that the defendants violated the antitrust laws by conspiring to fix oil prices and eliminate or suppress competition. In addition to damages and injunctive relief, plaintiffs ask the court to split Exxon, Chevron, and Phillips into smaller companies so that they do not have the power to control prices or engage in other anti-competitive behavior.
Private companies are generally forbidden to make agreements among themselves to fix prices or eliminate competition. When that happens, the antitrust laws allow affected consumers to sue for the damages they have incurred. In some circumstances, they are allowed to recover three times their actual damages.
No answering pleading in the case has yet been filed, but the defendants are expected to assert that they are immune from antitrust liability under the Noerr-Pennington doctrine, a judge-made rule that where the challenged joint conduct involves petitioning the government to adopt a law or directive (or complying with that law or directive once adopted), the actors can’t be held liable.
The rationale is that the First Amendment allows individuals and companies to petition the government to enact a law or create a mandatory directive, and if the government decides to adopt the law or directive, the companies can’t be liable for following it.
The Free Speech Center, a non-partisan public policy center devoted to First Amendment issues, explains, “even though a would-be monopolist who attempted to establish a price-fixing cartel would have been subject to anti-trust liability, the same actor who attempted to reach the same result by lobbying for legislation to fix prices would not have been subject to liability.”
Plaintiffs are represented by Joseph M. Alioto of the Alioto Law Firm in San Francisco.
Alioto thinks that Noerr Pennington has little applicability because the defendants weren’t trying to get a law passed or to enforce an existing law. They were looking for government help to further purely private commercial interests.
Stanford Law Professor Douglas Melamed, formerly the chair of WilmerHale’s antitrust group, has written extensively on antitrust issues. After reviewing the complaint, Melamed says that the plaintiffs’ theory, though a “long shot,” is “not crazy.”
Taking what the complaint says on its face, Melamed expects plaintiffs to argue that even if the defendants’ entreaties to the Trump administration to take action to limit production is protected by Noerr-Pennington, that won’t end the inquiry. The question then is whether the government required or mandated the defendants to cut production. If there wasn’t such a law or mandatory directive and the defendants, as a group, agreed to cut production, that could be an antitrust conspiracy.
Melamed suggested that the defendants will likely argue that there was no agreement among themselves to cut production, rather each company made its own decision. If that turns out to be the case, plaintiffs will need to prove an agreement by looking to all the circumstances surrounding the defendants’ conduct. “That’s what the case is going to come down to, I suppose,” Melamed predicted.
Alioto says that when he read about was happening in 2020, “I actually wrote to CEOs and the chairman and I warned them and told them that they cannot do that… it’s a plain violation of the law, because if you have an agreement on production that just immediately affects price, that’s what supply and demand is all about. But they went ahead and did it anyway.”
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https://www.sfexaminer.com/findings/employee-vaccination-bill-withdrawn-from-state-legislature/
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By Eli Walsh
A bill that would have required all California workers to prove they’ve been vaccinated against COVID-19 was withdrawn from the state legislature just before its first committee hearing, one of the bill’s authors said Tuesday.
Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks, D-Oakland, said the authors of Assembly Bill 1993 decided to withdraw it from consideration in light of the state’s sharp decline in COVID cases over the last two months.
The bill would have required all employees and contractors working in the state to prove that they were vaccinated against the virus or demonstrate a valid exemption by Jan. 1, 2023.
Wicks introduced the bill last month with Assembly members Evan Low, D-San Jose, Akilah Weber, D-San Diego, and Cecilia Aguiar-Curry, D-Winters, as co-authors.
“We are now in a new and welcome chapter in this pandemic, with the virus receding for the moment,” Wicks said in a statement Tuesday. “This provides for us the opportunity to work more collaboratively with labor and employers to address concerns raised by the bill.”
Wicks said the bill was also withdrawn due to opposition from law enforcement and public safety unions, and expressed hope that they would continue working with state officials to ensure the state’s police and fire department employees get vaccinated.
State employees, teachers and health care workers are already required under state health guidance to prove their vaccination status or provide a valid religious or medical exemption.
Wicks, Law, Weber and Aguiar-Curry are all members of the legislature’s COVID-19 vaccine work group, along with Sens. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, Dr. Richard Pan, D-Sacramento, and Josh Newman, D-Fullerton.
The legislators formed the work group in January in an effort to work with medical experts to determine the best ways to encourage state residents to get vaccinated against COVID and combat misinformation about the safety and efficacy of the available COVID vaccines.
“Vaccines, and vaccine requirements, remain a critical tool for moving from pandemic to endemic,” Wicks said. “That work is still needed, and it could still ensure that millions more Californians become vaccinated.”
As of Wednesday, 74.5 percent of state residents age 5 and up have completed their initial vaccination series. Another 9.4 percent have received at least one dose.
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20220401
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https://www.sfexaminer.com/findings/everyone-has-crypto-fomo-but-does-it-belong-in-your-portfolio/
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By Tara Siegel Bernard
The New York Times
Larry David travels through the ages, pooh-poohing many of the world’s greatest innovations — indoor plumbing, the dishwasher and, lastly, cryptocurrency. “Don’t be like Larry,” the Super Bowl commercial urges. “Don’t miss out on the next big thing.”
The presence of a boomer comedian pitchman, though, is just the latest sign that crypto has left behind its bleeding-edge roots. Institutional investors are pouring billions into digital tokens, athletes and mayors are taking part of their salaries in cryptocoins, and you may have already run into a bitcoin ATM at your grocery store.
And then there are bitcoin’s FOMO-inspiring, albeit insanely volatile, price movements: After peaking near $69,000 on Nov. 9, it was recently trading at about $39,300 — still almost five times its value in March 2020, according to Coinbase.
It’s challenging for a casual observer to disentangle the hype from any true potential, and yet it’s also hard to shake that feeling: Are digital tokens worthy of a spot in my portfolio? Are they even a viable asset class at all?
There are conflicting signals: The White House is moving toward developing a policy approach to crypto, but federal regulators overseeing workplace retirement plans all but banned it from those most sacred of accounts.
Even so, a growing share of steely buy-and-hold investors are being tempted. In a recent Bitwise/ETF Trends survey of financial advisers — who tend to be hired by the non-YOLO set — 16% said they had allocated crypto to their clients’ portfolios in 2021, up from 9% in 2020.
That’s not surprising: There are more ways in than ever.
It has been easy enough to open a basic account to buy cryptocurrency on the big trading platforms like Coinbase or Gemini, and it’s even possible through apps like PayPal or Venmo. But crypto is trickling deeper into traditional investment realms: Several bitcoin-linked exchange-traded funds hit the market in 2021, making it possible to just click “buy” in any brokerage account. Just last month, Betterment — an established roboadviser known for managing staid portfolios of cheap but reliable index-related funds — bought a firm that provides baskets of cryptocurrencies and related assets.
And there’s a steady beat of developments: BlackRock and Charles Schwab recently filed to register funds that track the crypto economy, while other providers continue to lobby regulators to let them unleash more products.
But even digital currency evangelists admit that investing in bitcoin and its brethren remains a largely speculative bet on an unknown future.
“This is a fast-moving market, and it’s hard to know where it will go,” said Matt Hougan, the chief investment officer at Bitwise Asset Management, which has $1.3 billion under management in roughly a dozen crypto-related funds.
Cryptocurrencies and their blockchains — the open and communally maintained electronic ledgers that record transactions — have potential that we don’t fully understand, Hougan said. Think of it like trying to guess the internet’s future in the early 1990s.
“The internet clearly represented a new way to distribute information and could have major consequences,” he wrote in a report. “But moving from that to predicting that people would, for example, regularly use smartphones to rent out a stranger’s house rather than staying in a hotel is a whole different matter.”
As enticing as it is to think you’re getting in on the next Google, it’s worth remembering that the dot-com boom went bust. Even Hougan believes regular investors should tread carefully when deciding how much of their portfolio to commit.
“Above 5%, it becomes the driver of the most painful drops in your portfolio,” he said. “It becomes very risky.”
The curious do not lack for choice. There are nearly 9,700 coins and tokens collectively valued at $1.9 trillion, according to CoinMarketCap, which tallies coins that meet certain minimum criteria. Bitcoin, which has been around for 13 years and is now legal tender in El Salvador, accounts for roughly 42% of that value. Ether, which has been around since 2015 and has more sophisticated abilities that allow it to be used in payroll and other arrangements, is roughly 18%.
Fidelity, which is better known for its giant 401(k) business but now has an arm dedicated to holding crypto for institutional investors, believes bitcoin should be viewed separately from the rest of the pack, with potential as an alternative currency or store of value, like gold.
“It just makes sense as an entry point for most investors,” said Chris Kuiper, director of research at Fidelity Digital Assets.
There’s no consensus, of course: Some experts suggest cryptodiversification. But no matter your preferred strategy, there are a variety of ways in, which are familiar to many investors.
One of the latest and potentially most seamless ways comes from Betterment, which recently bought Makara, a registered investment adviser that offers a series of ready-made, indexed crypto portfolios that provide direct exposure to the assets themselves.
There are dedicated baskets for bitcoin and ether, and a “blue chip” basket that holds the 10 largest digital assets on Makara’s platform. A so-called DeFi, or decentralized finance, basket — one of its more speculative — goes a step further and invests in companies that aim to re-create financial services without the middlemen, using blockchain and other technologies. Baskets with different assets charge a fee of 1% annually (a bitcoin- or ether-only basket does not charge fees), and the firm passes on trading costs of up to 0.35%.
Betterment CEO Sarah Levy said the company was still working through exactly how it would integrate Makara. But there will be disclaimers: “Part of what we will do as a fiduciary is explain that there is more risk,” she said.
Betterment said it wouldn’t recommend that customers put any more than 10% of their holdings on the platform into crypto, but it will “give customers agency within that context to make their own decisions,” Levy said.
Exchange-traded funds, which are baskets of investments that trade like stocks, may appear to be an efficient solution, but analysts and other experts say those available now probably aren’t the best way to buy and hold.
The reason: Instead of holding the cryptocurrency itself, these ETFs invest in futures contracts — essentially agreements to buy or sell an asset at a certain price sometime later. That can end up being more expensive because the contracts expire — and must be sold and repurchased, or “rolled,” each month. Those costs can be potentially significant, particularly when the new contracts cost more than the previous month’s, causing managers to buy high and sell low. Investors must also pay annual fees between 0.65% and nearly 1%.
“Futures-based ETFs are a lousy option for long-term exposure to bitcoin,” Ben Johnson, an analyst at Morningstar, wrote in a note. “Roll costs and fund fees will likely lead these funds’ long-term returns to lag the performance of bitcoin — probably by a wide margin.”
None of that stopped money from pouring into the first bitcoin-linked ETF, ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF. Its trading volume on its first day in October surpassed any other ETF in history, according to Morningstar, and it collected $1 billion in assets faster than any other ETF.
Several similarly structured funds have followed: Valkyrie Bitcoin Strategy ETF, VanEck Bitcoin Strategy ETF and Global X Blockchain & Bitcoin Strategy ETF, which, besides bitcoin futures, invests in another ETF that holds blockchain-related stocks.
Thus far, U.S. regulators have denied applications for ETFs that would hold cryptocurrencies directly. The head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, recently said the futures market was more heavily regulated, making it a safer bet for investors.
Other fund vehicles hold crypto directly, but they’re grappling with different structural problems and carry higher fees, which are a drag on returns.
Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, the largest bitcoin vehicle, with $27 billion in assets, costs 2% and trades on the “over the counter” market. But these trusts don’t have the flexibility of regular mutual funds and ETFs to balance supply and demand, so their share prices may deviate from bitcoin’s price. Another provider, Osprey Bitcoin Trust, became available (for a fraction of Grayscale’s cost) in February, but it faces the same challenges.
Grayscale, Bitwise and other providers have said converting to an ETF structure would solve these problems, but they haven’t received the green light from regulators, who worry that the underlying coins may be subject to manipulation and fraud. (ETFs that hold actual coins do exist elsewhere, though — the Fidelity Advantage Bitcoin ETF, for example, is available in Canada.)
Investors seeking professional guidance may find that more financial advisers now have firsthand cryptocurrency experience — some of which may be driven by an effort to educate themselves and field questions with more confidence. About 47% of advisers reported owning crypto assets in 2021, according to the Bitwise/ETF Trends survey, which polled 619 advisers. That was nearly double the result the previous year.
One adviser, Ritholtz Wealth Management, has gone as far as introducing, with partners, a crypto-related index providing broad exposure for its clients through a separately managed account. It charges 0.50% annually, and has a sign-up fee of 0.70%.
Crypto is “hard to ignore at this point,” said Michael Batnick, Ritholtz’s director of research.
Cristina Guglielmetti, a financial adviser in New York City, called the vast majority of her clients “prime crypto-curious”: “mid-40s, familiar with tech/pop culture — it’s all around them.” She tries to understand why they want crypto, while making sure that they’re aware of its place in their investment mix.
“Are we putting off other goals so you can do this?” she said. “Or have we handled everything else that needs handling, and now you’re in a good place to be doing more speculative things?”
That makes cryptocurrencies just like any other boom-or-bust investment, Guglielmetti said.
“We just have to understand what role it’s playing for you,” she said. “Having some fun and exploring new things is a perfectly valid role.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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https://www.sfexaminer.com/findings/how-bad-is-californias-drought-as-dry-season-approaches/
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By Soumya Karlamangla
The New York Times
Thursday marks the final day of California’s rainy season.
December, January and February are typically the wettest months in the Golden State, with 75% of the state’s annual precipitation falling between November and March.
Now we’re about to enter our dry season and the drought is nowhere near over. Gov. Gavin Newsom this week, in an attempt to curb water usage, proposed banning businesses from watering their lawns. More than 93% of California is considered to be in severe or extreme drought.
“We are definitely very much at the tail end of our wet season in California,” Jeanine Jones, drought manager with the California Department of Water Resources, told me. “We are not expecting any significant amount of additional precipitation — certainly not something that would make any difference for the drought.”
Jones added, “In other words, most of what we’re going to get, we have gotten.”
So where does that leave us?
All of California’s major reservoirs are currently at below-average levels. The state’s snowpack Wednesday was a dismal 39% of what it typically is this time of year, according to state data. Newsom hasn’t yet announced mandatory water cuts for Californians but faces increasing pressure to do so.
The water year in California runs from Oct. 1 to Sept. 30 and is defined that way so that the winter rainy season falls within a single water year.
Between October and December — the start of this water year — California received more rainfall than it had over the previous 12 months. Atmospheric rivers shattered records and replenished reservoirs.
But then we entered 2022. January and February represented the driest two-month start to a year on record in California, according to state officials. March is unlikely to be much better, even after this week’s storms.
The whiplash isn’t unusual in the Golden State; California has more climate variability than any other state in the nation, Jones said. And the weather has recently become even more unpredictable because of the effects of climate change.
Still, the heavy rains from the end of 2021 were not enough to overcome the past three exceptionally dry months.
At the end of December, the state had received 150% of the precipitation it typically has at that point in the water year. That figure has since dropped to below average — to roughly 70%.
Unfortunately, with March coming to a close and no storms on the horizon, we can say with near certainty that California’s drought in 2022 will keep getting worse.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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20220401
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https://www.sfexaminer.com/findings/lgbtq-groups-criticize-redistricting-plan-that-would-separate-the-tenderloin-from-soma/
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As San Francisco is set to redraw its district lines, a coalition of LGBTQ groups on Wednesday blasted a proposed plan that, according to the coalition, would separate LGBTQ communities.
The city’s nine-member Redistricting Task Force is set to approve a new district map that better reflects the latest census results by April 15.
Recently, the task force approved moving forward with a draft map that would move the Tenderloin from District 6 to a newly redrawn District 5, separating the Tenderloin from the South of Market area and enjoining it with the Western Addition neighborhood.
According to the coalition, the move, although not final, could displace some of the city’s most disadvantaged residents, as well as disconnect Compton’s Transgender Cultural District — the world’s first and only transgender cultural district — from nearby SoMa.
The coalition is calling for the Tenderloin and SoMa, both home to LGBTQ communities, be kept within the same district.
The coalition is made up several groups, including the Transgender District, the Harvey Milk Democratic Club, the Leather and LGBTQ Cultural District, the Alice B Toklas LGBTQ Democratic Club and the Tenderloin People’s Congress.
“The Tenderloin represents one of the last vestiges of housing affordability, socio-economic and racial diversity, trans and queer cultural heritage, and a dense concentration of legacy businesses that have been long-lasting community centers for all of San Francisco,” Transgender District Director of Social Justice and Empowerment Initiatives Jupiter Peraza said in a statement. “Keeping the Tenderloin and SoMa together in District 6 is an urgent and imperative matter — one that if not defended, could displace vulnerable communities that are already fleeing San Francisco at alarming rates.”
Leather and LGBTQ Cultural District Board President Bob Brown said, “Despite mobilizing dozens of community members to speak at the Task Force hearings, the current proposals do not maintain the current cultural district boundaries within the same district. We are united in making this collaborative effort to ensure that communities of interest have their voices heard.”
“LGBTQ people are not accurately or adequately counted in the census. The Redistricting Task Force has to do more to listen and engage with queer and trans people to keep our communities intact,” Harvey Milk LGBTQ Democratic Club President Edward Wright said.
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https://www.sfexaminer.com/findings/massive-monument-to-e-commerce-proposed-for-the-bayview/
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The southeastern corner of San Francisco could be destined for a new landmark: a mammoth monument to our e-commerce addiction.
The global warehouse developer Prologis is requesting approvals for the San Francisco Gateway, a two-building, 2.16 million square foot industrial facility bracketing Interstate 280 in the Bayview. The three-story structures would rise over 100 feet tall, in order to accommodate trucks on every level of the building. The buildings, which would include over 1,000 parking spaces shrouded by rooftop solar panels, would tower over the freeway and nearby grocery wholesalers.
Just days after Amazon put its San Francisco fulfillment center proposal on ice following a chilly reception at the Board of Supervisors, Prologis’ plan demonstrates the continued appetite for storage and logistics space in The City. While this project has yet to attract much attention from neighborhood and environmental groups, these kinds of developments have become political lightning rods elsewhere in the country.
The project, which has been in the works since 2016, still has many hurdles to clear. The environmental review process is expected to last into the second half of 2023, with multiple opportunities for public input along the way. After environmental clearance, the project will require several discretionary approvals from city agencies. Construction will take an additional two and a half years.
On Wednesday evening, the Planning Department hosted a virtual information session as the kickoff to the project’s environmental review process. The forthcoming environmental review will specifically focus on air quality, traffic, and noise, department consultants said. The presentation went on to describe how the project intends to transform the four 1940s-era warehouses on the site into a modern logistics behemoth.
The most conspicuous aspect of the project is its size. At nearly 2.2 million square feet, San Francisco Gateway would be triple the size of Amazon’s controversial Showplace Square proposal. (For context, Salesforce tower clocks in at 1.6 million square feet.) Amazon hit pause on its project earlier this month after the Board of Supervisors, pressured by organized labor, passed an 18 month moratorium on new parcel delivery services in San Francisco.
Prologis’ two, near-identical buildings would be designed for flexible use, potentially hosting multiple tenants with very different businesses. The space could be configured for truck or bus storage, a goods warehouse, a last-mile delivery center, or even a research lab. Each floor would have direct vehicle access via truck ramps at the southern end of each structure. The facility would accommodate an average of nearly 2,000 workers every day.
Prologis is also proposing significant changes at the street level, building new sidewalks and adding street trees, and making adjacent McKinnon and Kirkwood streets one-way to improve truck circulation. The ground level of the buildings would include retail and office space.
Despite calls for feedback at Wednesday’s meeting, no members of the public spoke up.
Over the past decade, and even more so since the pandemic-induced e-commerce boom, warehouses have emerged as one of the most lucrative real estate categories. In the New York area and Southern California’s Inland Empire, warehouse projects have triggered fiery development battles, pitting environmentalists and locals against economic development officials and consumers demanding ever quicker delivery services.
Since last year, the Sierra Club and organized labor organizations have been fighting several proposed Amazon warehouses across the Bay Area, highlighting the environmental toll of trucks going to and from warehouses, often through low-income Black and Latino areas.
With its Bayview location, the SF Gateway project is sited in a historically marginalized neighborhood, although it’s fairly distant from residential areas, unlike Amazon’s proposed facility in Showplace Square.
While it’s too early to assess the project’s environmental impact, the developer says that the rooftop solar panels could be used for electric vehicle charging. California regulations require truck manufacturers to gradually phase out gas-powered truck sales between 2024 and 2045.
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20220401
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https://www.sfexaminer.com/findings/sfpd-arrests-suspects-in-castro-theatre-burgulary/
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San Francisco police arrested three men on Tuesday morning after officers allegedly caught them burglarizing one of the city’s most iconic entertainment venues.
According to police, around 6:35 a.m., officers received reports of suspects trying to break into the Castro Theatre, located at 429 Castro St.
At the scene, officers saw broken glass at the theater’s front entrance and a man inside. Officers detained the suspect.
During a subsequent search of the rest of the theater, officers located two more men inside and detained them as well, police said.
Officers also located what appeared to be burglary tools.
Officers arrested the three men on suspicion of burglary. They’ve been identified as 25-year-old Nicholas Degrego, 38-year-old Gary Marx, and 32-year-old Jason Kilbourne. In addition to burglary, officers also arrested Degrego on suspicion of possessing drug paraphernalia, and Kilbourne for violating probation, police said.
The historic Castro Theatre turns 100 years old this year. According to Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, whose district includes the Castro, the broken glass has already been repaired.
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20220401
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https://www.sfexaminer.com/findings/troubled-local-hospital-under-scrutiny-for-onsite-overdoses/
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Laguna Honda is under the gun again.
The hospital is temporarily instituting tighter safety measures following threats from state and federal regulators to withdraw Medi-Cal and Medicare funding, putting the hospital in jeopardy of closing.
The warning comes after the hospital reported two non-fatal overdoses at the facility last year.
New security measures include stricter rules around visitors, such as searching care packages, and an increased number of safety searches among residents and patients.
But regulatory scrutiny at Laguna Honda is not new. It dates back to a 2019 scandal when an investigation found 130 patients at the hospital had been affected by multiple workers who violated patient privacy rights and both physically and psychologically abused patients.
The City paid a $780,000 fine as a result of the case, and more than tripled the staff in the hospital’s quality management department. It also made changes to its safety and reporting protocols. That, in turn, led to the hospital reporting two overdoses in July 2021, according to a statement from the San Francisco Department of Public Health, which owns and oversees Laguna Honda.
The two nonfatal overdoses involved methamphetamine and fentanyl, according to Wilmie Hathaway, Chief Medical Officer for Laguna Honda.
The overdose incidents spurred an extended review by the California Department of Public Health (CDPH). In October 2021, that review found the hospital to be in a state of “substandard quality of care,” according to a statement provided by The City’s Department of Public Health.
Now, one of San Francisco’s largest skilled nursing facilities is facing possible closure after failing to meet compliance in a series of state follow-up visits between October 2021 and March 2022.
In January 2022, during one follow-up inspection, a staff member was found not following undisclosed protocols and the hospital remained in non-compliance.
Then on March 16, on a second revisit from CDPH, a patient was found smoking in a community bathroom; smoking is prohibited indoors at the hospital. During the same inspection, another patient who was on oxygen was found in possession of a lighter, which can pose an extreme fire risk.
The hospital is now nearing the end of the six-month window it was given back in October to get back on track, and it has until April 14 to resolve any remaining issues that put the hospital out of compliance.
Hospital officials are now working with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to move forward and avoid terminating the patient funding channels.
“(CMS) have made it clear they believe it’s in the best interest of San Francisco that Laguna Honda remain open and they are extending every resource to make that happen,” Roland Pickens, Director of the San Francisco Health Network, the parent organization that Laguna Honda is a part of.
The vast majority of patient care at Laguna Honda is funded through Medi-Cal and Medicare. Losing the funding programs would severely impact the hospital’s 700 patients, many of who are extremely low-income. Losing participation in Medicare and Medi-Cal programs could put the hospital at risk of closure.
Patients and live-in residents at Laguna Honda have a wide range of complex health challenges, including severe mental illness, dementia, substance use disorder and more. It is not a locked facility, meaning most patients can come and go.
“We are an open campus. We allow visitors to come and visit loved ones and we do allow patients to go in and out of the campus if they are capable of it,” Hathaway said, adding that it’s possible that is how the contraband could have been brought in undetected. “There are patients rights and human rights we need to follow.”
Pickens added that the overdoses at the hospital mirror a broader health crisis that The City is now facing.
“Laguna Honda is reflective of the San Francisco community, and we all know the Mayor’s emergency declaration about substance use in The City,” said Pickens. “Many of our patients are able to go into the community, we don’t have control of what they get in the community but at least now we can do increased searches so they don’t bring anything inappropriate or illicit back into the community.”
Hospital officials said they are optimistic that compliance will be reached. But it’s unclear what would happen to the more than 700 Laguna Honda patients and residents if their correction actions fall short.
“That hopefully is a road we will never have to go down,” Pickens said.
sjohnson@sfexaminer.com
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https://www.sfexaminer.com/fixes/state-approves-grants-to-convert-hotels-into-permanent-housing-for-homeless-residents/
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By Eli Walsh
Oakland and San Francisco have been awarded a combined $22 million in state grants to convert hotels in each city into permanent housing for homeless residents, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office said Wednesday.
The city of Oakland will receive $14.8 million to buy and renovate the Piedmont Place hotel, located at 55 MacArthur Blvd., into 44 studio apartments and one two-bedroom housing unit.
Once completed, the complex will serve as permanent housing for chronically homeless residents and will offer counseling and other social services.
San Francisco will receive a $7.48 million grant to convert a 25-room hotel into permanent housing for young people aging out of the foster care system as well as residents at risk of homelessness who make 30 percent of the city’s Area Median Income, which was $119,136 as of 2020.
Like the Piedmont Place project, the complex in San Francisco will include supportive social services for its residents.
Both grants and projects are part of the state’s Homekey program, which the state launched in 2020 in an effort to expand housing access through the conversion of vacant hotels, motels and other buildings into both permanent and transitional housing units.
The state has awarded more than $1.3 billion in Homekey grant funding across the state since launching the program. Those funds have supported the creation of nearly 8,000 housing units, according to state officials, including hundreds in the Bay Area.
“We are continuing to act with urgency to fund quality Homekey projects, because that’s exactly what the moment demands — swift, decisive action to assist the most vulnerable Californians,” Newsom said in a statement.
The Oakland and San Francisco projects are two of 10 Homekey awards announced statewide Wednesday, totaling $136.6 million, according to Newsom’s office.
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https://www.sfexaminer.com/fixes/the-battle-for-homeless-youth-housing-in-the-haight/
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Supervisor Dean Preston’s campaign to transform the former Red Victorian Hotel in the Haight-Ashbury District into transitional housing for young people might be a lost cause. But he hasn’t given up.
Now he’s demanding that the city find a new home for homeless youth somewhere in the Haight.
Preston introduced legislation last week that would require The City to identify 20 units of transitional housing for people aged 18 to 29 years old in the neighborhood. It’s a place with a Panhandle-long history of welcoming wayward youth, but in recent months has become squabbles over homeless services.
“This should not be a controversial piece of legislation, nor should it be controversial to provide bridge housing for homeless (youth) in the Haight,” Preston told The Examiner in an interview last week.
In Preston’s opinion, The City has made a habit of cowing to a small-but-vocal contingent of residents opposed to homeless services, which they fear might make the neighborhood a magnet for the homeless.
Groups like Safe and Healthy Haight have sprouted up on Facebook, arguing that Preston has pushed to open homeless services but is out of touch with their impact on the neighborhood.
Preston’s legislation comes after he was unsuccessful in getting The City to ink a deal with the nonprofit sellers of The Red Victorian, a historic building now under contract with a different buyer.
The city deemed the Red Vic as unfit for use as transitional housing for a number of reasons, including its relatively small size and overall condition.
Preston’s bill essentially sends a message to Mayor London Breed’s administration: if you won’t take up my offer on the 21-room Red Vic, find a better location yourself. The legislation would require the city to find 20 transitional housing units in The Haight by the end of March of 2023.
“It is a response to an unfortunate pattern over the last handful of months of the administration not being willing to move forward and provide housing and services in the Haight,” Preston said.
The city dropped its plans last year for a drop-in center at the site of a former McDonald’s at 730 Stanyan Street, which had been used as a safe sleeping site for 37 tents to replace shelter lost during the pandemic.
Under Preston’s bill The Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing would have to update the Board of Supervisors on The City’s progress within four months of the bill’s passage.
The department did not respond to questions from The Examiner by press time.
The money for a new transitional housing facility is essentially already in hand, Preston argued. It’s the same pot of $10 million earmarked for youth transitional housing that Preston had hoped to use on the purchase of the Red Vic.
As the home of the Huckleberry House, Larkin Street Youth Services and the Homeless Youth Alliance, the Haight has a tradition of taking in young people experiencing homelessness.
But Preston argues that it’s actually lost services over the last decade, including the 2013 closure of a drop-in center operated by the Homeless Youth Alliance at the corner of Haight and Cole Streets. The nonprofit now offers mobile services.
The Huckleberry Youth Health Center, also at the corner of Cole and Haight Streets, serves young people up to age 26, and about two-thirds of its clients are over 18. It’s one of the city’s coordinated entry hubs that works to connect people to housing, but the supply is short.
“We assess more than 100, less than 200 a year, and very few of them, even if they qualify, have the opportunity for housing because there isn’t enough,” said Doug Styles, executive director of Huckleberry Youth Programs.
Styles sees the need for transitional housing.
“Anything would be good because there are people that qualify…and then we have to look at them and say you’re not qualified enough, you’re not desperate enough,” Styles said.
Despite recent struggles to locate new homeless services in the Haight, Preston believes the majority of neighbors support the efforts to open drop-in services on Stanyan Street and The Red Vic.
But groups like the Cole Valley Neighborhood Improvement Association advocated against the purchase, The Chronicle reported. It wrote in a letter to the Board of Supervisors, “The last thing this neighborhood needs is another attraction for street dwellers, many of whom are drug addicts and behaviorally challenged.”
Preston notes that nearly half of displaced youth in San Francisco were last housed in the city, according to the most recent Point-In-Time Count survey conducted by The City. A disproportionate number of them are people of color or LBGTQ youth.
If not for services provided by places like Huckleberry House and Larkin Street Youth Services, “there would be many many more problems with young people on the street,” Styles argued.
“We are in contact with a lot of them, we diffuse situations, we get people housing, we get people support for employment,” Styles added.
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https://www.sfexaminer.com/fixes/without-the-sat-and-act-whats-next-for-cal-state/
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By Mikhail Zinshteyn
CalMatters
In the acronym soup of California public higher education, gone are two three-letter combos that led legions of students to plug their noses annually: The SAT and ACT are (functionally) no more.
After the California State University system formally ditched the SAT and ACT as admissions requirements last week, the state is now the first — and only — in the United States to have no public university accepting standardized test scores for admissions.
The Cal State system followed in the University of California’s footsteps, which swore off the SAT and any other admissions test last year.
Cal State officials and the system’s academic senate cited studies showing that high school grades better predict how well students will perform in their first year of college than test scores. Other data showed that predictive power only went up marginally when test scores were combined with high school grades; the makers of the SAT say the test’s predictive boost is significant. Critics have also long maintained that the SAT rewards students who have the financial resources to hire tutors or enroll in prep courses to improve their test scores, leaving low-income students at a disadvantage.
Both the UC and Cal State system are now “test-blind” — a rarefied club of 86 academic institutions and systems nationwide. Another 1,825 other campuses don’t require test scores but will still assess them if a student submits that information, a concept known as “test-optional.”
So, what will the era of admissions without tests look like at the nation’s largest public four-year university?
The future of Cal State admissions
Until the COVID-19 pandemic, the system’s 23 campuses chiefly admitted students based on a formula of high school grades and ACT or SAT scores. Only in the last two years, after suspending its SAT requirement during the pandemic, has the system relied on other factors.
The system’s Admissions Advisory Council plans to submit a final set of admissions eligibility criteria to the California State University Office of the Chancellor by late spring.
The recommendations will largely reflect the work the system did during the pandemic to replace its testing requirements with additional information about an applicant’s high school grades and socio-economic factors.
Currently, the minimum eligibility requirement is a 2.5 grade point average for California high school graduates and a 3.0 if the applicant isn’t a state resident. Another is to complete the required 15 courses in math, English, science, history and other subjects, known as A-G courses. Some campuses accept slightly lower GPAs but consider other academic and socio-economic factors.
The Admissions Advisory Council — in the first change to the system’s eligibility index since 1965 — is instead proposing that the minimum eligibility criteria include four factors:
- the students’ GPAs for the 15 required courses;
- whether students passed more than 15 of the required courses during their time in high school;
- whether students attend either a high school that is near the Cal State campus to which they’re applying or attend a high school with a high percentage of students who receive federal meal subsidies because they’re low-income;
- other socio-economic and interpersonal factors, such as whether students worked during high school, had no one else in their family complete college, had family commitments or volunteered.
The system is now developing the minimum GPA and weights for these factors. Once published, campuses will be able to use a formula to calculate whether applicants are eligible for admissions. It’s a quantitative approach that resembles use of an eligibility formula during the SAT era. Officials may continue to tweak it over time.
The Cal State system will roll out its new criteria gradually, giving it time to communicate the details to high school counselors. Current high school juniors who apply to enroll at a Cal State in fall 2023 will be admitted based on the current minimum eligibility criteria. Today’s high school sophomores seeking entry into a Cal State for fall 2024 will be admitted based on the current criteria or the new eligibility index in the works — whichever is more advantageous for them. Students applying for fall 2025 admissions will be governed by the new index.
Abandoning test-based criteria couldn’t come sooner for low-income students, said Cal State trustee Krystal Raynes, an undergraduate at Cal State Bakersfield.
“I remember saving up my lunch money to take both the PSAT and the SAT because my parents didn’t know what that was and didn’t want to spend money on me taking a test,” she said at the March board meeting, a day before the trustees voted unanimously to ditch admissions tests. “Meanwhile I knew students who were prepping with tutors in junior high, so there’s definitely that economic gap there.”
Criteria for more competitive campuses
But minimum eligibility isn’t enough of a cut-off for numerous Cal State universities. Right now seven universities are fully impacted, a technical designation meaning a major, program or the whole university receives applications from more qualified students than there’s space. All but seven campuses have at least one major program that’s impacted.
The Cal State admissions policy plan is to allow these oversubscribed programs to continue using a combination of up to 21 different admissions factors to admit students. These overlap partly with the newly proposed minimum eligibility criteria but include other variables, such as grades in specific high school subjects, whether students qualify for an application fee waiver and their military status. No campus uses all 21 factors for admissions.
Like the minimum eligibility index in development, all of these factors are data the Cal State application already collects. The system software is sophisticated enough to calculate the admissions scores for each campus based on the admissions criteria they select.
Though the Cal State system admits 93% of the California high school students who apply, several campuses are far more selective. Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo, and San Diego State, the most competitive, admit only a third of their California freshmen applicants.
Spotlight on admissions criteria at popular campuses
Presently six of the 23 Cal State campuses won’t consider any in-state student with a GPA below a 2.5. Even within this group, campuses are using multiple factors to handle their influx of applicants by balancing academic and socio-economic factors.
“Unequivocally, I think it is a great move” to remove admissions tests, said San Diego State President Adela de la Torre. “If we’re going to talk about diversity and inclusion, you have to have metrics that reflect a broader set of criteria.”
The San Diego university expanded its criteria for admission for students entering last fall. Half of the admissions score is based on the GPA a student earned in the 15 required courses for entry. The other half includes the grades in math and science courses, foreign language, history and whether a student comes from a local high school. The university also gives extra points for signs of socio-economic hardship among students applying from nearby high schools or entering special programs for marginalized students, like for foster youth.
San Diego State will largely keep this formula beyond 2023, but like other campuses, it may change its weights and add more admissions variables over time.
Long Beach State guarantees admission to local high school students who meet the minimum eligibility requirements. Other students will be held to a higher admissions standard. All impacted Cal State campuses give some kind of admissions priority to applicants attending local high schools. Long Beach State has more than 50 public and private high schools in its local service area.
At Cal Poly-Pomona, 86% of the points in the admissions formula come from academic factors and 14% are based on non-academic areas.
Unlike the UC, Cal State has no admissions readers
The UC campuses hire hundreds of part-time application readers who undergo training to go through every application. The Cal States have no readers and never did. And unlike the UC, the Cal State application doesn’t ask students to provide essays or extended written responses.
UCLA hires 200 part-time readers who earn stipends of $1,350 to $2,500 depending on the number of applications they review. The university received nearly 150,000 freshmen undergraduate applications for fall 2022 enrollment, the most in the country. Other UC campuses shared that they bring on 50 to 160 readers; the numbers vary depending on each campus’s application volume.
The price tag for readers at UCLA is between $400,000 and $500,000. Meanwhile, the entire operating budgets of the admissions offices at Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo and Cal State Fullerton are around $2.2 million.
Cal State campus admissions officials will occasionally review individual applications, such as when a denied student files an appeal. Admissions teams also spot-check applications to see if students omitted required information. Plus some music and performing arts programs require applicants to submit portfolios that faculty then review.
For the record: This story has been corrected to reflect the accurate price tag for readers at UCLA.
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https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/editorial-san-francisco-must-take-urgent-action-to-expand-homeless-shelter-options/
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By The Examiner Editorial Board
Is 2022 the year when San Francisco leaders will finally do what’s necessary to provide shelter to the thousands of people living in misery on our streets? It depends on whether the Board of Supervisors decides to support Supervisor Rafael Mandelman’s proposal to require The City and the county to offer shelter to anyone experiencing homelessness.
Mandelman’s “A Place for All” proposal would require the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing to quickly develop an “implementation plan” to provide shelter for those in need of it. This plan would include an estimate for the number of people expected to seek such housing and the costs of creating and providing such shelter on an ongoing basis. City officials would also be required to conduct an inventory of available city buildings and lots that could be used as shelters.
“San Franciscans are frustrated, and rightly so, that after multiple decades and many billions of dollars spent to ‘solve homelessness,’ thousands of unhoused people continue to sleep on the streets night after night,” said Mandelman in a March 22 press release introducing the ordinance. “For all the money we spend and have spent, it’s reasonable to expect clear improvement in the situation on the streets, and frankly people are not seeing that.”
Mandelman’s proposal, a revised version of a previous effort that failed in 2020, is co-sponsored by supervisors Matt Haney, Gordon Mar, Myrna Melgar and Catherine Stefani. Haney, who said he opposed Mandelman’s previous proposal because it relied to heavily on tent encampments, supports the new version because it focuses on getting people into more traditional forms of shelter.
“The pandemic proved that we are capable of doing amazing things — coming up with creative solutions and implementing them successfully,” said Haney in a statement. “We need to approach homelessness with the same urgency and focus and come up with a plan to get people off the streets and into care.”
With San Francisco poised to spend $1 billion on homelessness in the next few years, taxpayers will expect results in a city where the problem only seems to get worse with each passing year. The lack of available housing and shelter has resulted in an explosion of tent encampments as well as people sleeping in whatever alley or doorway they can find.
San Francisco, and the Bay Area in general, needs more affordable housing. Yet a policy of defunding shelters in order to focus on solutions like permanent, affordable housing has helped create crisis levels of unsheltered homeless people on our streets, according to a 2021 report by the Bay Area Council.
“While this reprioritization is consistent with national trends and numerous studies on the long-term effectiveness of permanent housing, the high-cost Bay Area has been unable to scale permanent housing faster than the rate at which residents are becoming homeless,” according to the “Bay Area Homelessness: New Urgency, New Solutions” report. “The result has been the de facto warehousing of increasing numbers of homeless residents on Bay Area streets, cars, and RVs along with the intraregional shifting of shelter burden to the City of San Francisco, which was the only Bay Area County to have increased its shelter inventory over the past decade despite already providing far more permanent housing and shelter per capita than other Bay Area Counties.”
Among other things, the report called for Bay Area cities to expand the availability of emergency shelters, noting that the number of unsheltered homeless people in the Bay Area increased by 63% between 2010 and 2020. In San Francisco, the number of unsheltered homeless people increased by 76% during the same period of time.
The City now faces a homelessness crisis of unprecedented proportions, and Mandelman is right to call for a new approach. While The City must continue to build more housing, including affordable and permanent supportive housing, the growing problem of homelessness far outpaces our ability to build new housing units to match the need. Trying to solve the urgent homelessness crisis on our streets with permanent housing only is like trying to bail out the ocean with a teaspoon.
Mandelman’s proposal lays out San Francisco’s 40 years of failed attempts to make a dent on homelessness and sets forth a clear plan to do better. It calls for The City to expand its shelter program with a mix of options, including shelters, converted hotels and tiny homes. It also caps safe sleeping tent sites at 20%.
The proposal deserves a full debate by the Board of Supervisors, and anyone opposed to “A Place for All” should present an equally thoughtful plan to address the crisis of homelessness with the urgency it deserves.
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https://www.sfexaminer.com/opinion/opinion-growsf-is-using-the-school-board-recall-to-promote-a-more-conservative-san-francisco/
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The fallout from the school board recall has taken an ugly turn, and at least some recall proponents are revealing their efforts were never just about education policy.
As pretty much the whole country knows, San Francisco voters chose to recall three members of the school board in a February election that was not very close. A consensus formed that The City’s substantial Asian American electorate played a key role by voting heavily in favor of the recall. Incidentally, that mobilization helped recall Faauuga Moliga, the first Pacific Islander to hold a citywide elected position in San Francisco, so the extent to which this was a clear triumph for the AAPI (Asian American Pacific Islander) community should be questioned.
Now, the politics of Asian American voters have taken another turn. GrowSF, a conservative PAC that supported the recall and wants to see San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin recalled as well, sent a mailing to the districts of Supervisors Gordon Mar and Connie Chan. Both Mar and Chan are Chinese American, and both represent the western part of The City — the Sunset and Richmond respectively, with large Chinese American populations.
The mailing, which was printed in both English and Chinese, attacked the two supervisors for not supporting the recall and suggested they were sacrificing the well being and education of young people in their district. However, GrowSF, a new organization seeking to mobilize tech workers and others new to San Francisco politics to promote a more conservative vision for The City, overplayed its hand here, revealing itself to be less concerned about young people and more about expanding its political power and conservative agenda in San Francisco.
GrowSF’s rancor at Mar and Chan may be related to the recall, but it actually arises from the two supervisors’ positions opposing GrowSF on building large amounts of market-rate housing in the western part of The City, closing the Great Highway to cars and the Chesa Boudin recall.
Ironically, while GrowSF seeks to position itself as a kind of no-nonsense, solutions-oriented organization, which can cut through the lefty politics which allegedly have ruined San Francisco, the political action committee attacked Mar specifically for opposing recalls. Earlier this year, both Mar and Chan voted with the majority on the Board of Supervisors to make recalls more difficult in San Francisco.
“Nearly 82% of your neighborhood voted to recall the school board, yet Supervisor Mar opposed it and he even voted to make recalls harder. Gordon Mar is out of touch,” reads the flier from GrowSF.
Mar and Chan’s position on the recall process, with apologies to GrowSF — which claims to be for “common sense solutions to our city’s problems” — is, in fact, common sense.
Recalls are expensive, distract politicians and are a way for weaker political forces to gain power by exploiting technical loopholes rather than by winning elections. Most are unsuccessful and a waste of time and money. Californians need to look no further than the attempted recall of Governor Gavin Newsom, which cost taxpayers more than $200 million.
By quickly turning on Mar and Chan, GrowSF revealed that its movement is not focused on improving education or helping young San Franciscans. Rather, it is an effort to move the city rightward by people who understand that in San Francisco phrases like “common sense” or “competence” are a more politically palatable code for “conservative.”
Supervisor Gordon Mar explained to me, “GrowSF and downtown special interests in support of luxury housing development, especially on the west side, understand that agenda and that message doesn’t resonate with most residents of our city, especially on the west side, so they are clearly trying to find other ways to promote their agenda … by focusing on slogans like common sense solutions.”
Supervisor Connie Chan made a similar argument when we spoke. She criticized GrowSF and other “right wing political groups disguising themselves as moderates … Any time they have any disagreement or resentment they immediately go to recall.” Chan added: “‘Competence matters’ what does that mean?”
It is notable that both targets of GrowSF’s direct mail campaign are Chinese American. Thus far, GrowSF has not targeted non-Asian elected officials, such as Supervisors Dean Preston and Shamann Walton, who also opposed the recall. Instead, GrowSF is using Chinese American support for the school board recall as a wedge issue to promote a more conservative vision of San Francisco.
Mobilizing voters, regardless of ethnicity, to support a recall is simply politics. And if Asian Americans were largely in favor of the recall, then targeting them for the recall effort is fair game. However, going after the two Chinese Americans on the Board of Supervisors because they don’t take the position that GrowSF would like San Francisco’s Chinese American voters to have is a bit different.
When we spoke, Mar said the racial politics at work in the mailer are clear.
“This is a cynical ploy by GrowSF and the interests they represent to attempt to exploit the Chinese community for their own agenda,” Chan said. “They’re also targeting Chinese Americans and the only AAPI on the Board of Supervisors. They are pitting the AAPI community against their electeds.”
Grow SF’s tactics reveal that the School Board recall was much bigger than children and education, and that victory has emboldened the right in San Francisco. Those forces will now turn their attention to recalling Chesa Boudin and — if they are successful — will seek to move the Board of Supervisors rightward, either through recalls or generously funding more conservative candidates.
The new San Franciscan conservative movement is emerging, cloaked in platitudes about common sense and brandishing recall petitions.
Lincoln Mitchell has written numerous books and articles about The City and the Giants. Visit lincolnmitchell.com or follow him on Twitter @LincolnMitchell
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https://www.sfexaminer.com/sports/the-2022-giants-will-win-or-lose-in-the-margins-its-what-they-do/
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By Mark Kreidler
Special to The Examiner
Wait: Is it really going to come down to Steven Duggar?
You know what? It just might.
Duggar is not the name you’re thinking of. I understand. You’re thinking of other Giants as the people who might be making the difference between a playoff-contending team and a thanks-for-stopping-by collection of pretty well-liked grinders. We all reach for the familiar names: Crawford, Belt, Longoria.
And it is certainly true that the old guard came up huge last season. The Brandons both had something very close to career years, respectively, and the now-departed Buster Posey had easily the finest season of the last several — one of his best all-around campaigns in total, influenced heavily by the Giants’ limiting him to 113 regular-season games.
But you go a little farther inside that 107-win monster of a success, and you see where the difference was made. It wasn’t just veterans putting up exaggerated versions of the solid seasons normally expected of them. The success was very much in the margins.
Darin Ruf? Incredibly important piece, and a breakout winner. Tyler Rogers and Jake McGee broke out as bullpen arms. Donovan Solano was really important and mostly really good. Wilmer Flores was needed way more than the Giants had planned, and he held the fort, appearing in 122 games at either third base, short or second.
It was like that. And now, with Posey gone and Solano gone and rotation leader Kevin Gausman gone (we didn’t mention Gausman; had the best season of his life at age 30), it’s going to come down to the margins once again.
We’re not talking about 107 wins — we’ve already discussed that. But to be a contender in an expanded playoff format? That effort will be built on the Giants’ continued ability to help players find the best versions of their professional selves. Gabe Kapler’s staff has been pretty great at that. This year, we’ll see.
We will see about Duggar. He’s no kid; at age 28, the outfielder is very much at a point where his career is ready to launch. He has had parts of four seasons in San Francisco, and now, with LaMonte Wade Jr. on the injured list to begin the year, Kapler has indicated that Duggar is in line for an enlarged role.
Duggar is a left-handed hitter with some pop, and he can play anywhere in the outfield. He’ll matter immediately, because the Giants have little choice — they need to keep a lefty bat in the lineup most of the time. But this is also about what Duggar can become: more selective and patient in counts, a better user of his excellent speed. If you’re looking in the margins, he’s there.
Mike Yastrzemski — he’s in the margins. For two years, Yastrzemski was a tough out, and in 2020 he also took walks willingly. Incredibly patient. Last year, without much warning, his numbers fell off the table. You wouldn’t say the Giants won in spite of him (he still hit 25 homers) but he was nowhere near as fearsome a force as he had been.
Yastrzemski, now 31, is working through a tight quadriceps, so he may not exactly blast out of the gate. But if you’re trying to figure out how the Giants stay competitive offensively in the full post-Buster era, he’s one of the first places to look. Yastrzemski went .224/.311/.457 in 2021, a weird step backward. If he steps forward, it matters.
You want to see the Giants play meaningful games in September and October, watch Joc Pederson for more than a minute. The club signed Pederson to help them navigate this new era in the National League, the era of the designated hitter. Pederson is a career .232 hitter — but there’s power there, if he can reach it. If he can, Pederson is a credible home run threat almost all of the time. The Giants have to help him reach it.
And that’s life in the margins, right? General manager Farhan Zaidi and Kapler and the entire staff turned 2021 into a sort of ongoing exercise in finding the right player for the right moment, and also in the moments of ongoing need. Third baseman Evan Longoria, a team leader, played only 81 games last year because of injury, and he’ll miss at least six weeks this season after surgery on his right index finger. Filling that spot defensively, and making up for the loss of Longoria offensively — those are the kinds of locks that the Giants successfully picked a year ago.
This year? Maybe it comes down to Mauricio Dubon finding his niche, or to Logan Webb building off of his outstanding work as a starter in ‘21. Webb took a quantum leap, so it’s probably unfair to expect another — but maybe Camilo Doval is ready to be great out of the bullpen. You’re not expecting Doval, because he was just a rookie last year. It could be time, though. That’s how winning happens.
There’s no getting around the big stuff. If Belt can’t get or stay on the field, if Crawford regresses in a harsh way for some reason or Joey Bart struggles behind the plate — if big guys don’t perform, the Giants are already in trouble. But let’s assume competence. Let’s assume the starting rotation is as solid as it looks, and that the Giants are going to be right there.
“Right there” means close, not in it. To get all the way in it, to be in another playoff hunt, requires that a franchise now clearly built on recognizing and developing emerging talent – no matter the age — comes through once again. Duggar. The return of Yaz. Doval. Pederson.
They’re not the people you’re thinking of, because these aren’t the Dodgers. You can’t just scan the superstars and make your prediction. The 2022 Giants will win or lose in the margins. It’s what they do.
Mark Kreidler is a freelance contributor to The Examiner. Read more of his columns at https://markkreidler.substack.com
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https://www.sfexaminer.com/sports/whats-wrong-with-the-warriors-heres-the-deal/
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By John Krolik
Special to The Examiner
With a handul of games left to go in the regular season, the strengths and weaknesses of the Warriors are becoming clearer and clearer.
Most importantly, Golden State’s half-court offense is out of sync. It goes beyond the absence of Stephen Curry. The Warriors are attempting to do what they usually do, which is use passing and off-ball movement to break down defenses while keeping dribbling at a minimum. Problem is, it’s not working. The Warriors are struggling to get good looks.
Draymond Green is still responsible for doing most of the playmaking in the half-court. But his decision-making has been off. Green has the highest turnover rate (the percentage of a player’s possessions that end in a turnover) in the entire NBA. Green’s turnover rate is a sky-high 18.5. That would be bad for a stone-handed big man encouraged to do as little as possible on offense. (For a point of reference, DeAndre Jordan has the second-worst turnover ratio in the league.) For a player who is relied upon to be a primary decision-maker, it’s absolutely unacceptable. Green is trying to force passes through holes that aren’t there.
It makes sense that Green would be trying to generate offense through riskier passes in the absence of Curry. Unfortunately, the fact that everybody in the building knows Green isn’t going to look for his own shot in the half court compounds the issue. He still yet to score in double-figures in 2022. When the opposing defense doesn’t have to worry about the player with the ball being a scoring threat, they’re going to stick to their assignment more tightly and shrink the window a pass could go through. Green does seem to be turning a corner physically after missing a significant amount of time with an injury. Steve Kerr noted as much after Wednesday’s game against the Suns, saying it was “definitely” Green’s best performance since his return.
The Warriors don’t run teams off the floor like they did earlier in the Kerr era. However, when the situation calls for it, this is still a team capable of injecting some organized chaos into the game when the situation calls for it. The Warriors looked like they were heading towards the wrong side of a blowout early in Wednesday’s game. Then they started to push the pace, attacking in transition and trying to strike as early as possible in the shot clock. That’s when good things began to happen.
This is where Green really shines. When he gets the ball in the backcourt off a miss and starts flying up the court before the opposing defense can get set, he’s a true weapon. Not many frontcourt players can match Green’s straight-line speed off the dribble. When he gets a head of steam before the defense sets up and the Warriors go into their half-court actions, he’s far more willing to call his own number and attack the basket. And Green’s superb court vision is never more valuable than it is in a full-court situation against a scrambling defense.
When asked about what the Warriors can do to increase their pace of play and what they need to improve in half-court situations after Wednesday’s game, Kerr said the following:
“Defense and rebounding allows you to get out and run. One thing Draymond allows you to do is push the pace. We’ve gotta get the wings out to run, and in the half court obviously we’ve got to practice and get our guys to execute better there.”
One positive for the Warriors is that they seem to have a budding star in Jordan Poole. Poole went for 38 points on 11-22 shooting from the field and 7-15 shooting from beyond the arc against the Suns. He did it all offensively. He’s clearly learned some things about off-ball movement watching Steph Curry for as long as he has. He was in constant motion without the ball. He slalomed around screens to free himself up for three-point shots. When the defense overplayed him, he flew backdoor for layups. There was no doubting it – some of the off-ball tricks he was using to get his shot were straight out of Curry’s playbook. He used step-backs to get himself space. He attacked the basket off the dribble. He set up teammates when the defense collapsed on him. And he did it all with the supreme confidence of a player who knows he has the skill to be an impact player.
After the Suns game, Kerr noted that Poole is getting himself space but no longer rushing when he gets open. He’s calm, confident, and collected. He’s going to be a key player for the Warriors down the stretch run.
Unfortunately, Poole’s confidence seems to have been directly transferred to him by Klay Thompson. Thompson still hasn’t found it. He went just 1-10 from beyond the arc on Wednesday, and at times was visibly frustrated after missing a shot. After the game, Kerr noted that Thompson has been “pressing,” which is exactly what Poole hasn’t been doing during his breakout season.
So that’s where things stand with the playoffs looming and Curry still in street clothes. The half-court offense needs to get its timing back and take better care of the ball. The Warriors can still do damage in transition, especially with Green commanding the fast-break. Jordan Poole is looking like a bona fide offensive force, while Klay Thompson is still looking for his All-Star form. The Warriors will need to step things up if they want to compete for a championship, but there are still plenty of reasons for optimism.
John Krolik is a freelance contributor to The Examiner.
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https://www.sfexaminer.com/findings/study-shows-eye-popping-percentage-of-s-f-tech-jobs-are-now-wfh/
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If you wondered just how work-from-home cozy San Francisco tech got last year, here’s an eye-popping stat:
Eighty-one percent of tech job postings in San Francisco last year allowed working from home, new industry data shows. That dwarfs all other tech hubs, especially San Jose, where just 18% of 2021 job postings were for remote jobs.
“Among all tech job postings in 2021, 28% specified a WFH or hybrid work option, or slightly over 1 million job postings,” writes the nonprofit Computing Technology Industry Association in its new State of the Tech Workforce Report. But The City was way out in front of other tech hubs, no doubt in part due to our early-applied and only recently relaxed COVID-19 guidelines.
The low Silicon Valley number may be due to jobs at big tech companies invested in large campuses. Seattle, with Microsoft nearby, had just 23% remote jobs among its postings, with Boston at 29% and Austin at 33%. Only San Diego was anywhere close to our WFH number, with 49% of its postings giving the option.
Here’s something else that jumps out: San Francisco is already booming in 2022 with job growth, which the report projects will be 4.3% this year – and that is the highest rate in the country. One big area of that growth is emerging tech, like AI and cryptocurrency. In fact emerging tech is the second-biggest job category in The City and in San Jose, behind only software engineering.
“If you look at the San Francisco and San Jose metros, you do see the emerging tech category as number two, and that probably does differentiate that region compared to others,” Tim Herbert, CompTIA’s chief research officer told me.
Last stat: The Bay Area also led in salaries for the 90th percentile of workers. Hey, tech workers in San Francisco, look around the office or Zoom call: One in 10 of your coworkers makes, on average, $217,477. In San Jose, the top 10% of workers average a salary of $228,223…
This is intriguing: AirMyne, a new Berkeley startup, says it is developing a machine to suck carbon dioxide from the air. “AirMyne is developing a way to remove CO2 from the air to permanently reverse emissions,” its website says. And the machine is “built for scale,” the website says. PitchBook says it just joined the startup incubator Y Combinator and has quickly picked up two small funding rounds…
You may have wondered why on earth anyone would buy “digital fashion” – clothes or “flair” that you can put on an avatar in the metasphere. Well it turns out there may be a dollars-and-sense reason to buy a meta sweater, or cap, or purse: It’s way cheaper than the real world version, and you can see if you like it before plunking down real money. “By emulating clothing, users may explore trends, styles, and brands without needing to purchase physical pieces,” explains Victoria Trofimova, CEO of Nordcurrent, a game developer in Lithuania…
The San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security on March 28. The non-profit digital rights group is demanding records related to what it says was “a multi-million dollar, secretive program that surveilled immigrants and other foreign visitors’ speech on social media.” EFF says the program grew out of the “extreme vetting” initiatives of former President Trump…
Finally, there’s this: The non-fungible token craze (NFTs) has come for Leonardo da Vinci, and a multi-million-dollar hologram of a classic work is the result. It is due to be unveiled in our fair city soon.
The people who sold the most expensive digital artwork ever are unveiling a hologram of da Vinci’s masterpiece “La Bella Principessa” during a blockchain conference April 4-5 at the swanky Ritz Carlton Hotel in the Financial District. This thing could go for big bucks when it is auctioned April 21. MakersPlace, a San Francisco company that hosted the $69 million sale of a Beeple artwork on its online marketplace, is working on the project with an outfit called the Holoverse.
The companies say this about the artwork: “The hologram is generated by rotation at very high speed (900 rotations per minute) of four blades containing 256 micro LEDs and microprocessors, which use an algorithm to compose the work in the air.”
I have no idea what that means, either. You can check it out here: theholoverse.io. If Leonardo were alive, I bet he could figure it out.
Send items to jelder@sfexaminer.com
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https://www.sfexaminer.com/entertainment/celebrated-local-theatre-marks-its-100th-birthday/
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Throughout its 100 years, the Golden Gate Theatre staged everyone from Josephine Baker to Frank Sinatra and Sting, while it operated first as a vaudeville house, then a major movie theatre and finally as a performing arts venue.
“The Golden Gate has served as an anchor, bringing millions to enjoy entertainment under its iconic four-story neon sign, giant stage and ornate lobby,” said BroadwaySF managing director Rainier Koeners. “It has served as a home for touring Broadway shows now for more than four decades and its future is bright.”
Designed by G. Albert Lansburgh, the 2,300-seat venue opened in March 1922 with a silent feature starring Gloria Swanson and a seven-act vaudeville show. Back in the day, the Examiner equated the theatre to being as “spacious as the outdoors.”
The racial integration of workers, performers and audiences served as a distinction for the theatre. Baker, who refused to play in front of segregated crowds, became the venue’s first performer to have her shows extended by popular demand.
In 1949, billionaire Howard Hughes bought RKO Pictures, the company that owned the Gate, and alternated between live performances and movies.
Live shows were gradually phased out and the Golden Gate was soon converted into a Cinerama theatre, where images from three synchronized 35mm projectors were displayed on a giant wraparound screen.
To accommodate the screen, the lobby’s giant marble staircase was removed and drop ceilings were installed.
Facing stiff competition from other movie palaces, the Gate was split into two separate theatres and the mezzanine was rechristened as the “Penthouse Theatre.”
By 1970, the Gate’s owner went bankrupt. At the time, Sam Perlman, the venue’s manager, told the Examiner, “There are no more good pictures to show in them anymore. The so-called fine arts pictures which are mostly concerned with sex and mental aberration, have taken over the market.”
The theatre shuttered its doors in 1972.
BroadwaySF purchased the venue in 1979, removing the false ceilings as well as the escalator. The stage was updated to accommodate modern productions that toured in San Francisco.
Golden Gate reopened to the public on Dec. 29, 1979 with the musical “A Chorus Line.”
Over the years, productions such as a revival of “The Music Man” starring Dick Van Dyke and a national tour of “Hello Dolly!” starring Lowell High School graduate Carol Channing made pit stops in The City.
Since its reopening, the theatre has welcomed productions including a national tour of “Fiddler on the Roof,” starring Harvey Fierstein and a touring production of “Pippin,” starring Lucie Arnaz.
The theatre has also held several world premieres, including the Broadway tryout of “Legally Blonde: The Musical.”
Refurbishments were made to the theatre in 2017. New additions included customized light fixtures as well as upgraded electrical and air conditioning systems. Burgundy stage drapery and a red and gold carpet were also installed, with elements including scrolling leaves and flourishing rosettes.
Though digital signage was added to the theatre’s exterior, its iconic 4-story marquee remained intact and will soon be flashing upcoming productions like “Rain: A Tribute to the Beatles,” “Oklahoma!” and “Cats.”
jsalazar@sfexaminer.com
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https://www.sfexaminer.com/entertainment/fun-free-cheap-what-to-do-in-san-francisco-this-week-15/
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By Johnny Funcheap
Special to The Examiner
Rare painting on display for first time in 200 years
During the French Revolution, artist Marie-Guillemine Benoist set out to prove that women could render history paintings just like the men and created a work to showcase at the Paris Salon of 1791. Following the exhibition, Benoist’s “Psyche Bidding Her Family Farewell” was hidden away in a private collection for over 200 years. On March 24, the Legion of Honor acquired this rare Neoclassical painting to showcase in its main galleries. And now the public — and all Bay Area residents who get free admission to the museum on Saturdays — can admire the work of this groundbreaking artist and see it in person for the first time in centuries. On view in Gallery 16 of Legion of Honor, 100 34th Ave., S.F, Free admission for Bay Area residents every Saturday. legionofhonor.famsf.org
29th annual Cesar E. Chavez Festival & Parade
San Francisco pays tribute to labor and civil rights leader Cesar E. Chavez with its annual parade and festival in the Mission honoring his contributions to farm workers and the Latino community. The parade starts from Dolores Park and ends up at 24th Street, where you’ll find a five-block street fair filled with two stages of mariachi bands, ballet folklórico dancing, brassy banda big bands and youth spoken word. There’s also a lowrider car show taking over an entire block with 50+ classic cars from the 1930s-1960s and an entire COVID relief vendor booth area dedicated to helping people not only get vaccines and boosters, but also guide them through all the rental relief options and job placement. Saturday, April 9; festival: 10 a.m.-5 p.m., 24th Street between Folsom and Bryant; parade: 11 a.m.-12 p.m., Dolores and 19th to Folsom and 24th; Free. cesarchavezday.org
Golden Gate Park Circus Day
If you want to run away and join the circus, you don’t have to go far. Local nonprofit Circus Center takes over Golden Gate Park’s music concourse for an afternoon of live music, interactive circus workshops and back-to-back circus performances. This is your chance to learn balancing tricks and juggling from helpful circus coaches. Or if you just want to sit back and watch someone else do it, turn your eyes toward the bandshell stage where more than a dozen performers show off acrobatic tumbling, hoop diving, aerial arts, juggling feats and the ancient Mongolian art of contortion. Saturday, April 9, 12:30 to 3:30 p.m., Golden Gate Park Bandshell, Music Concourse Dr., S.F., Free. sfrecpark.org
Sunday Streets 2022 season kick-off
Before there were “slow streets,” there were Sunday Streets. The cars get a day off — and your feet, bikes, tricycles and roller skates get a day on — as this monthly event transforms a mile or so of city streets into a long car-free block party. This year’s series kicks off in the Tenderloin with Larkin Street, Ellis Street and Golden Gate Avenue filled with block after block of brass band parades, poetry, flea markets, giveaways, DJs, art activities, hula hooping, chalk art, a pop-up BMX and skateboard park, a Thai New Year celebration and tons more. Sunday, April 10, 11 a.m. – 4 p.m., Larkin Street, Ellis Street and Golden Gate Avenue, S.F., Free. sundaystreetssf.com
2022 Soapbox Derby
Watch art literally go downhill. Back in 1975 and 1978, SFMOMA commissioned hundreds of artists to make custom-designed soapbox derby cars and ran gravity-powered races pitting a car made entirely of bread and a vintage bathtub on wheels. And now after 40+ years, the derby back. Fifty six teams will coast their wild designs down the curves of John F. Shelley Drive to compete for artist-designed trophies where style wins over speed. In between heats, there’s live music, food and family fun, along with “SideCaraoke” from a custom-made Filipino motorized tricycle with a built-in karaoke machine. Sunday, April 10, 12-5 p.m. Jerry Garcia Amphitheater, McLaren Park, S.F., Free. sfmoma.org
Visit Funcheap.com for a hand-picked list of more fun, free and cheap things to do in San Francisco.
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https://www.sfexaminer.com/entertainment/women-take-and-make-the-stage-in-fefu-and-her-friends/
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American Conservatory Theatre is using the entirety of its Strand Theater facility to open a unique and experiential event this month. First produced Off-Broadway in 1977, “Fefu and Her Friends” is a highly regarded play by María Irene Fornés, described by Jesse Green of the New York Times as “more often read and studied than seen” in his review of a rare 2019 revival.
There’s a reason for that. The play has three distinct sections, and the middle one requires four different scenes to be performed simultaneously — just like in real life! — for an audience that has been clustered into four groups. This means four distinct but reasonably adjacent performing spaces that allow the audience pods to move around with ease and witness all four sequences before returning to the proscenium stage for the conclusion.
“We’re taking this opportunity to put these four spaces in different locations all over the Strand,” says Pam MacKinnon, director of the play and artistic director of A.C.T. since 2018.
“So, it’s not just the normal experience of passively listening to a play.” She adds, possibly as a reassurance, “None of it is scary. There are elevators!”
“María Irene Fornés was a prolific playwright as well as a director and an educator,” MacKinnon continues, “and she has a big before and after in the American theater that I don’t think has registered beyond a tighter circle. She also had a huge, huge influence as a teacher of playwriting.”
Pulitzer Prize-winning writers like Tony Kushner, Paula Vogel, Lanford Wilson, Sam Shepard and Edward Albee agree, citing Fornés as an inspiration and influence.
Another aspect of the play abnormal for a typical theatergoing experience is that the cast of eight is all women. As the play’s title tells you, this is time spent with Fefu and her friends, and MacKinnon has gathered an ensemble of what can only be described as leaders of the Bay Area talent bank.
This rare occurence generated expressions of joy, frustration and hope in a roundtable discussion with MacKinnon and company early in the rehearsal process.
“I think the order in which the audience sees the four scenes will create different experiences because things are going to unfold in a different pattern for each one,” suggests Lisa Anne Porter, actor and frequent director and dialogue coach. “I imagine coming into the third act, every group will be in a slightly different place based on the last echo they’ve heard.”
Catherine Castellanos, a regular on Bay Area stages and at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, plays the eponymous Fefu and concurs. “If your final scene is the bedroom scene, where a character is having a hallucination, a very buzzy scene — that’s the lens with which you step back in to watch part three and that’s a very different experience perhaps than the garden scene between Fefu and Emma.”
“I think, as an actor, it’s really fun to get to repeat something four times (in one performance),” offers Leontyne Mbele-Mbong, whose credits include work with Aurora Theatre Company and the African-American Shakespeare Company.
“Eight on matinee day,” adds actor-director Cindy Goldfield with a rueful smile, having just completed work on “A Grand Night for Singing” at 42nd Street Moon, which overlapped rehearsals for “Fefu.”
“I think it’s like an invitation for myself as an artist to build a different type of muscle in stamina and then to play,” says Sarita Ocón, who plays Christina. “How to stay ever-present given all the factors coming into each room each time.”
“It feels very fly on the wall,” adds Mbele-Mbong, “because even though there is something untraditional about the movement, the scenes themselves still have that fourth wall.”
Shakespeare is a prevalent thread across these actors’ resumes. Though, despite a handful of compelling female characters, the Bard has proven no panacea for women over four centuries.
“So are you the queen or are you her servant?” asks Stacy Ross in a velvet-over-steel voice dripping with hauteur.
“Then you have a 45-minute break,” adds Castellanos. “We’re in the kick-off, and then we have a break until Act V.”
“Where we all shut up anyway,” adds Ross for the rimshot.
That dearth resulted in the birth of many all-female Shakespeare companies like A Woman’s Will and the Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company, where many in the “Fefu” cast have credits.
“It was a game-changer for me,” says Porter of experiencing titles like “Hamlet” or “Richard III” with all women. “I didn’t even know what was changing until I was in the room and realized that I could just go and be in my body.”
“I was just thinking about that,” adds Mbele-Mbong. “It didn’t occur to me when I was with Woman’s Will. There is something super fun and exciting to playing Count Orsino, but here all of the characters are actually women. We can be all be women in this space, and that’s kind of a different thing.”
“My origins with an all-women cast started with Lilith Theatre in the Bay Area,” says actor-playwright-comedian Marga Gomez. “I was 20, and I wound up on tour in Europe with them, and it was deliberately a feminist theater. It was an amazing way to start earning my living as a performer.”
“Fefu and Her Friends” is set at a summer home in New England in 1935, placing it within the generation of women’s suffrage, though for white women. The play was first produced in 1977, during the women’s liberation movement. Today, we live in the tension of #MeToo, a still unratified Equal Rights Amendment and shifting gender roles and identities. These juxtapositions, the near-absence of men in the creative process and the artists’ lived experiences have all informed the rehearsal process.
“We spent many long days talking about the state of the feminine, the state of gender politics and the state of privilege,” says Goldfield. “I think that there are huge resounding echoes from each of those time periods. It’s a room full of women here — the performers, the stage managers, the staff, everybody. Then, every once in a while, a man walks in and at least I feel it. I’m aware of what we’re saying and how it lands. That is my internalized patriarchy speaking. I’m don’t want to ruffle the fancy feathers of the men. Still, their absence and then occasional presence heightens the awareness of how women behave when they’re out of the male gaze.”
“The characters are having large conversations, but the soapboxes are not about feminism. They’re about education and other things,” adds Mbele-Mbong.
“It’s a bold act that we’re putting eight women on the stage and that it is a Fornés play,” observes Ocón. “I think it is a challenge to steer audiences away from compartmentalizing women. … It is my hope that when our audiences come, they will see bold, brave, courageous, thought-provoking humans. See our human essence on stage.”
“I think part of the muscle of this play is it’s not asking for any permission,” says Castellanos, almost in counterpoint.
“I believe in putting complicated human stories on the stage,” MacKinnon adds, “and Fornés was someone who, as both writer and director, challenged herself each time up to bat, to play with form, but also to really obey her voice.”
IF YOU GO:
“Fefu and her Friends” by María Irene Fornés
Presented by American Conservatory Theater
Where: Strand Theater, 1127 Market St., S.F.
When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays–Fridays; 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Saturdays; 2 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. Sundays. Closes May 1.
Tickets: $25 to $110
Contact: (415) 749-2228, act-sf.org
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https://www.sfexaminer.com/faces/lieutenant-governor-eleni-kounalakis-becomes-first-woman-to-pass-a-state-law-in-california/
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By Emily Hoeven
CalMatters
A whopping 172 years after California joined the Union, Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis on Thursday became the first woman in state history to sign a bill into law.
Kounalakis, who is serving as acting governor while Gov. Gavin Newsom is abroad on a family vacation, signed a bill to protect hundreds of thousands of renters from eviction hours after state lawmakers sent it to her desk and hours before the protections — which had already been extended twice — were set to expire.
Kounalakis wrote on Twitter: “I remain more determined than ever to ensure that while I may be the first (woman) to (sign a bill into law), I will certainly not be the last. … Today’s action will provide additional time to thousands more (renters) who are in the process of acquiring emergency relief.”
Under the new law, Californians who applied to the state’s backlogged pandemic rent relief program before 11:59 p.m. Thursday will be shielded from eviction through June 30, CalMatters’ Manuela Tobias reports. As of Tuesday, California had paid just 223,000 of the nearly 507,000 households seeking relief, according to a state dashboard.
The stopgap measure left many unsatisfied.
Some lawmakers and tenant advocates said the state should have extended the rent relief application deadline past Thursday, arguing that many needy Californians weren’t aware of the program or faced language barriers. Renters who didn’t apply by the Thursday deadline can face eviction proceedings starting Friday.
Other officials denounced a provision of the bill that blocks some cities from implementing local eviction protections until July 1. “It’s completely outrageous,” San Francisco Supervisor Dean Preston told the Associated Press. “The state should be helping us here and not tying our hands.”
Meanwhile, some landlord groups said the bill wasn’t fair to them. “Landlords are dying under this financial pressure,” said Daniel Yukelson, executive director of the Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles. “There have been no resources really provided to rental property owners throughout this process.”
Finally, Attorney General Rob Bonta put eviction lawyers on notice, saying his office had received reports that some landlords or their attorneys were seeking to push through evictions by “falsely declaring” tenants hadn’t notified them of pending rent relief applications.
Against this intense political backdrop, Kounalakis is set to continue serving as acting governor until April 12, when Newsom returns from vacation. It isn’t the first time she’s filled in for Newsom at a high-stakes moment: Last year, she represented California at the United Nations climate change conference in Scotland after Newsom abruptly canceled his trip there to spend Halloween with his family.
These high-profile experiences — plus her tweet — suggest that Kounalakis may be gearing up for a future gubernatorial run. And, if the certified list of June 7 primary candidates Secretary of State Shirley Weber released Thursday is anything to go by, Kounalakis looks to be headed for an easy reelection as lieutenant governor.
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https://www.sfexaminer.com/faces/whats-johnny-love-been-up-to-just-ask-him/
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Johnny Love turning 60? Say it ain’t so.
As San Francisco’s favorite restaurateur and bartender put it, “Holy smokes. How did that happen?”
For anyone who spent the ’90s boozin’ and schmoozin’ at the man’s eponymous club on Polk Street, that may be a sobering thought. But here’s the good news. He’s still going strong. And he’s still having more fun than you.
We caught up with Johnny ahead of his April Fools Day birthday bash, for which he planned a party at the Blue Light, the place he bought from Boz Scaggs back in the day. Looking back on his career, it’s been quite a ride.
Before he became Johnny Love, he was just John Metheny, a rugby player at Cal who played on the great Jack Clark’s first national championship side. (One night, one of his frat brothers saw him chatting up a young lady at a bar and coined the nickname. It stuck. “My mom called me Johnny Love,” he said with a chuckle.)
Love bartended his way through college and Clark helped him get a job after graduation at the famous fern bar, Henry Africa’s. (Mr. Africa was actually named Norman Hobday, but chose a nom de consume for his watering hole.) He tried his hand as a stock broker, but that didn’t work out. “My third day was the crash,” said Love, referring to Black Monday, in October of 1987. “I just knew it wasn’t good timing to be there. I stayed two years, but I kept bartending.”
It was around that time that Love met Harry Denton, another legendary San Francisco clubkeeper, and he was off on his true path.
Denton helped him open his first joint, the Fillmore Grill, on the corner of Clay, and they remained lifelong friends.
“He was the first guy to say you’ve got to open up your own bar. He was very helpful,” said Love. “A lot of people thought we were partners. Just because he was so helpful. It was one of these odd couples. He was an older gay man and I was a younger heterosexual. But we had the same sense of humor. I loved the guy to death.”
(Denton passed away in August of 2021 in Seattle. Anyone who ever heard his voice will never forget it.)
So, yeah, Love bought the Blue Light. Opened up Johnny Love’s on Polk Street. Opened two more, in San Diego and Walnut Creek, and became one of San Francisco’s celebrity nightlife characters. His clubs were the place to be back in the day.
“That went on for many years,” Love told me. “It was unbelievable. I have pictures of Michael Jordan, Barry Bonds, Pelé, Mark McGwire. …”
He forgot to mention Gregg Allman, Herb Caen, Chris Isaak and Richard Branson, to name a few more celebs. But I’ve seen the pictures.
I asked him if he ever settled down, after the party died down. “I never did get married. Had some close calls. I’ve lived with girls,” said Johnny. “And no, never had kids. But I’m the best uncle in the world.”
All these years later, Love remains in the business, owning four S.F. restaurants and planning to launch a fifth. You can find him at the Toy Soldier and Vida Cantina SF, both on lovely Belden Place. Like for most restaurant owners, the pandemic was no fun for Love.
“The parklets have been brilliant. They saved our lives,” he said. “We did it. We survived. … It was just a roller coaster.”
Cheers Johnny. San Francisco still loves ya.
♦
Couple of leftovers from the Charlotte Mailliard Shultz memorial at Grace Cathedral this week. Willie Brown stole the show, as he is wont to do. He told us Charlotte had arranged her own funeral. And his. He joked that the lord now has a chief of protocol. And like any great politician, he was counting on the support of his friends.
During Charlotte’s new tenure in heaven, Brown hopes she will act as a diplomat, “because some of us will not have earned the right to enter. Charlotte will tell Him why Willie should be there.”
On another note, when they piped in Henry Kissinger’s voice into the grand cathedral to give a eulogy, it sure felt like the voice of God raining down on all of us. Who knew God had a German accent?
♦
Let’s end this week’s journey on Hippie Hill. Reefer madness will return to what used to be Golden Gate Park’s Sharon Meadow April 20, where thousands should gather to celebrate cannabis.
There shall be tributes to Robin Williams and Bob Saget. Mike Tyson will be there, hyping his Tyson 2.0 pot brand. Jeff Ross will be roasting people and blunts.
Sure sounds like San Francisco is getting back to normal. But commercializing 420? You asked for legalization, people. It comes with a price.
Editor’s note: The Arena, a column from The Examiner’s Al Saracevic, explores San Francisco’s playing field, from politics and technology to sports and culture. Send your tips, quips and quotes to asaracevic@sfexaminer.com.
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https://www.sfexaminer.com/findings/hunters-point-homeowners-win-settlement-over-toxic-waste-exposure/
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A federal judge this week approved a settlement between housing developers and homeowners at the San Francisco Shipyard over allegations the homes — located at the site of a former naval shipyard — were built over toxic waste.
Back in July 2018, homeowners at the San Francisco Shipyard, a housing development located on the site of the former Hunters Point U.S. Navy shipyard, sued Tetra Tech Inc., Lennar Inc., and Lennar’s affiliate FivePoint Holdings Inc.
The suit alleged defendants Lennar and FivePoint Holdings developed and sold about 350 homes on a portion of the former naval site for about $1 million each. The suit further alleged that while the homes were marketed to prospective buyers as clean and safe, Tetra Tech — the environmental firm hired by the Navy to clean the site — failed to properly rid the site of toxic materials.
According to court documents, on Monday, U.S. District Judge James Donato approved the $6.3 million settlement between the homeowners and Lennar and FivePoint, despite objections from Tetra Tech.
Tetra Tech has denied any wrongdoing and is not a part of the settlement. Despite this, attorneys for the plaintiffs consider the settlement a big win for Hunters Point residents, who have long alleged the area continues to be contaminated.
“As we celebrate this victory, we are mindful that the fight for our community continues. We are grateful for the thousands of community members who are litigating in order to hold Tetra Tech and others responsible,” plaintiff and Salvation Army Director of Homeless Initiatives and Community Development Theo Ellington said in a statement.
Attorney Joe Cotchett with the law firm representing the plaintiffs, Cotchett, Pitre, and McCarthy, said, “The battle is just beginning — this case is part of the largest environmental fraud litigation in the country’s history. At their core, the cases are about environmental racism. Southeast San Francisco carries a tremendous environmental burden — it is the most polluted part of the city and has been for generations.”
“The settlement with Lennar and FivePoint took over a year of negotiations,” said plaintiff attorney Anne Marie Murphy. “The Tetra Tech scandal, as described in our case and related cases brought by the Hunters Point residents, police officers, and whistleblowers, really rocked the city — with this settlement done, we can be laser-focused in proceeding with the case against Tetra Tech.”
Attorneys for the plaintiffs said the settlement will be given to plaintiffs in payouts ranging from hundreds of dollars to tens of thousands.
The former 500-acre Navy shipyard in Hunters Point was exposed to radiation when it was used between 1946 and 1969 as a radiological defense laboratory by the Navy to study the effects of radiation on animals and materials and to decontaminate ships used in atomic bomb testing. In 1974, however, the site was closed and developed into housing, offices and industrial facilities.
In 2002, the Navy hired Tetra Tech to clean up the radiation, however, ten years later in 2012, former workers contracted by Tetra Tech alleged the firm’s cleanup data had been falsified and manipulated in order to minimize evidence of soil contamination.
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https://www.sfexaminer.com/findings/snowpack-report-signals-bad-news-for-californias-drought/
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The Sierra Nevada roughly translates to “snowy mountain range” in Spanish, but as the world warms, the dense snowpack that gave the high peaks its name is waning.
As the summer months inch closer, state officials have made clear that the drought gripping the state is set to continue based on snowpack data released Friday.
“Some may say this is a wake-up call. I disagree. The alarm has already gone off,” said Wade Crowfoot, the state’s Natural Resources Secretary, standing at Phillips Station, a scarred and snowless meadow just west of Lake Tahoe that burned in last year’s Caldor Fire. “Climate change is here, and climate change has been here in California and across the American West.”
The first of April marks an important date for state water managers because it indicates when the snowpack is at its peak for its water content, said Sean de Guzman, manager of the Snow Surveys and Water Supply Forecasting for the Department of Water Resources (DWR).
“California is now facing a third consecutive year of dry conditions and extending this ongoing drought,” he said. “We have less snow right now than we did last year at this time.”
The reason for concern is not purely the decline of the snow-capped mountains but also because a third of the state’s water supply is sourced from the Sierras. Data collected from such surveys determine how much water will be allocated to reservoirs and residents in the warm, dry summer months ahead.
The survey recorded Friday at Phillips Station, one of 260 sites DWR monitors, revealed just 2.5 inches of snow depth and a snow water equivalent of one inch – four percent of average. Snow depth is the overall snow on the ground, while the snow water equivalent is the amount of snowmelt that turns into freshwater. Statewide, the snowpack was 38 percent of average, said de Guzman.
The dismal results came on the heels of news that the start of this year has been the driest in a century. It’s a reality that prompted Governor Gavin Newsom to issue an executive order to encourage local water authorities to activate stricter conservation measures.
“Conservation at this point in time is really the largest piece of the puzzle that we have a direct influence on,” said Dr. Andrew Schwartz, the station manager and lead scientist at UC Berkeley’s Central Sierra Snow Laboratory. “We can’t control the weather. We can’t control how fast our snowpack melts or how much of our snowpack there is every year. Ultimately, we have to be able to alter our own behavior to use the water that we do have efficiently.”
Although San Francisco’s water exists separately from the State’s Water Project that feeds much of the Central Valley and Southern Califonia, the Tuolumne watershed, managed by The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, currently sits around 41 percent of average, noted Schultz, “so San Francisco might need to worry a little bit, too.”
Another challenge is that warming temperatures are shifting the behavior of snow and complicating forecasters’ ability to accurately predict Spring runoff.
“The problem – and this is a really big issue – is that it turns out that more and more of the snow isn’t running off. It’s what we call sublimating, which means it’s literally evaporating into the air,” said Dr. Peter Gleick, a scientist and president emeritus of the Oakland-based Pacific Institute.
Last year, the April snowpack essentially vanished, never turning into the runoff Californians depend on for drinking water, agriculture, and industrial uses, and causing headaches for DWR, which had already allocated the water.
“They grossly overestimated how much water, even the little bit of snow that we got, would produce,” said Gleick. “This year, the worry is that even that amount of snow will again not produce the amount of runoff that the models tell us to expect. And that makes everything even worse.”
Although evaporation has always occurred, said Schultz, fire scars like that at Phillips Station also accelerate these conditions. “In these very large fire scars that we have, evaporation actually increases a substantial amount because of the increased temperatures and higher winds that result after the trees are damaged or moved by the fires,” he said.
Another issue, experts say, is that California is operating a system of dams and infrastructure based on an old water system.
“We built an entire system on a different climate,” said Caitrin Chappelle, an associate director of the California Water Program at the Nature Conservancy. “What we’re seeing right now, literally right now, is that it’s so much warmer in the Sierras is that that water is either melting faster – it’s not maintaining its snowpack – or it’s coming down quicker or it’s just sinking into the ground. It’s not creating a slow release that we’re used to in our system.”
While the fierce winter storms that blanketed the Sierras in snow this year have helped alleviate some of the drought impacts from last year’s paltry precipitation numbers, many of California’s reservoirs remain below average, leaving state officials once again imploring all Californians to take further actions to conserve water.
“The fact that the climate is changing is clear,” said Crowfoot. “The question is, what are we going to do about it?”
jwolfrom@sfexaminer.com
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https://www.sfexaminer.com/fixes/riders-rejoice-van-ness-bus-lane-now-in-service/
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For some San Franciscans, this April 1 was a major holiday — no joke.
Just outside the War Memorial Opera House, a crowd of about 200 people gathered at 9 a.m. to celebrate the long-awaited opening of the Van Ness Bus Rapid Transit line. Dignitaries spoke, opera was sung and a ribbon was cut, but the real action was on the bus.
After enduring nearly six years of construction, transit enthusiasts young and old couldn’t wait to try out the red bus-only lanes stretching along the median of Van Ness Avenue from Mission Street to Union Street.
“Last night I couldn’t go to sleep because I was so excited for this,” said Mac Lester, 12, as the 49 bus glided past Tommy’s Joynt.
His friend Austin Lee, 18, was similarly enthusiastic. “This is going to be the ride of a lifetime,” he said while capturing footage for his YouTube channel.
Others came on the inaugural ride to mark the important milestone for The City. “I ride the bus all the time and I’m a senior,” said Roseann Gould, 84. “I wanted to acknowledge all the hard work that’s been done here.”
The long-delayed and over-budget construction project loomed over the day’s festivities. Several public officials at the ribbon cutting event used the phrase “long time coming.” Mayor London Breed assured the crowd, “No, this is not an April Fool’s joke.”
San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency Director Jeffrey Tumlin apologized to the community surrounding Van Ness for the disruption they endured as The City replaced 150 year-old underground utilities and built the transit line. He added the transit agency has learned a lot from the project, and is applying those lessons to forthcoming projects, such as the one on Geary Boulevard.
But the new and improved Van Ness also serves as one of the most vivid examples — second only to car-free Market Street — of The City’s efforts to reallocate street space for transit, bikes and pedestrians. The project is “part of our efforts to re-imagine San Francisco’s streets,” Tumlin said, “to rethink our streets to allow them to move more people as The City grows.”
Later this year, SFMTA will mark an even bigger transit milestone when it opens the Central Subway project linking Chinatown, Union Square and Mission Bay.
While riders celebrated, some were frustrated by the fact that as this year’s major projects open up, no others will be under construction. “This has been the most important bus project in The City, so it’s great to see it coming to fruition,” said Peter Straus, a transit activist and former SFMTA planner. But, he said, “we’re not moving fast enough on other projects,” like the extension of the Central Subway to Fisherman’s Wharf or the tunnel connecting Caltrain to the Salesforce Transit Center downtown.
For 49 Van Ness-Mission bus riders, the new lanes provide a considerably improved experience. With no traffic ahead, buses whiz from stop to stop. The ride from Market Street to Union Street takes about 15 minutes, a travel time improvement of over 30%.
Eventually, buses should only have to stop at bus stops, thanks to timed traffic signals. But on day one, some of those signals had not yet been activated, and buses got caught at a few red lights.
For bus operator Brandon O’Bannon, driving the new lanes was “a lot of fun… It feels great not to deal with traffic and lane closures.”
O’Bannon also noted the pavement felt very smooth under the tires, quite different from the bumpy conditions on Mission Street and other routes.
He wasn’t alone. Tomer Bear, 4, was able to stand up on a moving bus all by himself for the first time.
bschneider@sfexaminer.com
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https://www.sfexaminer.com/fixes/state-extends-pandemic-eviction-protections-hours-before-expiration-deadline/
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By Eli Walsh
Bay City News Foundation
State officials enacted a last-minute extension Thursday of some pandemic-related eviction protections, just hours before the deadline for tenants to apply for rent relief.
Assembly Bill 2179 — authored by Assemblymembers Buffy Wicks, D-Oakland, and Tim Grayson, D-Concord — will shield some renters from eviction through June 30, 2022, by requiring a judge to delay an eviction hearing if the state has not yet processed a tenant’s rent relief application.
Starting Friday, those who have not applied to the program will no longer be protected from eviction proceedings even if they have not paid rent due to lost income during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Tenants can only apply to the rent relief program if they have outstanding unpaid rent due to a loss of income caused by the pandemic, as the state’s full moratorium on evictions due to pandemic-related income loss ended Sept. 30, 2021.
“Today we upheld our promise to hundreds of thousands of Californians — renters and landlords alike — that we will help them through the financial hardships caused by the pandemic, and keep them in their homes while we do it,” Grayson said in a Twitter post.
While the state has dispersed some $2.5 billion to cover tenants’ unpaid rent, roughly 284,000 applications are still pending, according to data from the state’s rent relief program. Tenants will have until 11:59 p.m. Thursday to apply to the program.
The state Assembly approved AB 2179 62-1 on Monday while the Senate approved it 36-1 on Thursday as legislators hustled to keep protections in place for applicants before protections were set to end April 1.
Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, the state’s acting governor while Gov. Gavin Newsom is out of the state, signed the bill into law shortly after the Senate’s vote, becoming the first woman in California’s history to do so.
“I am deeply humbled to take this action and to be part of history today as the first woman in state history to sign legislation into law,” she said in a statement. “I remain more determined than ever to ensure that while I may be the first to do so, I will certainly not be the last.”
In addition to protecting tenants with pending rent relief applications, AB 2179 will also prevent some local governments from enforcing their own COVID-related eviction protections until after July 1 if they were originally adopted after Aug. 19, 2020.
As a result, local eviction protections in cities like San Francisco and Richmond will be postponed and superseded by the state’s eviction rules, while those in the city of Oakland and Alameda County will remain in place.
That portion of the legislation drew opposition from Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, and Assemblyman Phil Ting, D-San Francisco. Wiener and Ting were the lone dissenting votes against AB 2179 in both chambers.
“There is no policy rationale for overriding local eviction protections in San Francisco, etc., while allowing other cities to protect their renters,” Wiener and Ting said Monday in a joint statement. “This arbitrary distinction is harmful to San Francisco renters, as well as renters in other cities and counties that aren’t part of the favored group of cities.”
AB 2179 also drew opposition from tenants’ rights advocates, who echoed the same concerns as Wiener and Ting.
“Their intent with this bill is to protect the 300,000 applicants still waiting for rental assistance, which is good,” said Christina Livingston, the executive director of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment.
“But by forcefully removing the local protections of nearly 4 million renters on April 1, and providing no state-level equivalent of protection, AB 2179 is a horrific deal that will result in a surge in evictions statewide, and far too many families becoming homeless,” Livingston said.
Advocacy groups for property owners and landlords, meanwhile, called for Thursday’s extension to be the last, arguing that some property owners may be forced to lose their properties if they cannot collect past-due rent or evict tenants for not paying.
The California Rental Housing Association said in a March 25 statement that it opposed AB 2179, with the group’s president Christine Kevane La Marca arguing that pandemic-era protections were no longer necessary as the virus has receded statewide and many other state health mandates have been rescinded over the last two months.
The CalRHA says it represents some 20,000 members who own more than 575,000 housing units across the state.
“Enough is enough,” Kevane La Marca said. “Some of our members have not received rental income for more than two years and can no longer make ends meet.”
The California Apartment Association, which also represents the state’s property owners, supported the extension but also argued that pre-pandemic eviction rules should return on July 1.
CAA CEO Thomas Bannon also suggested in a statement Thursday that “unethical tenants” have fraudulently withheld rent payments and hid behind pandemic-related restrictions.
“We’re hopeful that program administrators will do whatever it takes to finish the job and provide both renters and housing providers the help they’ve been promised,” Bannon said. “Come June 30, when all qualified applications are paid, there will be no need for any more COVID eviction moratoria, state or local.”
Tenants and landlords can apply to the rent relief program at https://housing.ca.gov/covid_rr/index.html.
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https://www.sfexaminer.com/sports/giants-2022-will-they-thrive-or-dive/
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By Chris Haft
Special to The Examiner
Here’s one way of placing the Giants’ 2021 season in perspective … and in the rear-view mirror. If they endured a 17-game dropoff this year, they’d still win 90 games. And that would probably be enough to qualify them for the postseason in the newly expanded, 12-team format.
Amassing 90 victories would mean losing an average of three more games each month, given the Giants’ franchise-record victory total last year. Their 107-55 finish reflected sheer consistency: They recorded winning percentages of .600 or higher in all six full months of the baseball calendar.
With that kind of steadiness, when will the inevitable decline occur? Or will a decline even occur?
It borders on preposterous to believe that the Giants can win 100-plus games again. The Giants have accomplished this back-to-back feat exactly twice, most recently in 1912 (103-48) and 1913 (101-51).
But that’s ancient history, and this is 2022. The slate is clean for San Francisco, and 29 other teams, so anything is possible.
Here are three reasons why the Giants can reach or even just approach 100 wins again, followed by three reasons why they’re due for a slump.
Why they’ll thrive
1. Attitude
The Giants have regained much of the swagger they possessed when they were winning World Series’ in 2010, 2012 and 2014. They regard winning as a given.
“You think you can do it again, that’s first and foremost,” Giants broadcaster and former pitcher Mike Krukow said. “When you have that belief before the first pitch is thrown, you’ve already accomplished a lot. You play six months and each month you play .600 ball, you come to have expectations. It’s healthy. Only a catastrophe changes that mindset. Everybody within that clubhouse expects nothing less than what they had last year. Now, will they win 107 games? No. That’s the first time they’ve done it in 139 years.”
Then Krukow cited a published prediction that called for the Giants to finish 79-83. “That’s insulting,” Krukow said. “They feel like they’re getting slighted. So they’re highly motivated once again.”
2. In Farhan We Trust
Except for Giants lifers Brandon Belt and Brandon Crawford, veteran Evan Longoria and preserved prospects such as Joey Bart, Camilo Doval, Sean Hjelle, Heliot Ramos and Tyler Rogers, many key performers, as well as manager Gabe Kapler, were obtained by Farhan Zaidi, the club’s president of baseball operations who earned credibility with a series of low-profile yet astute transactions. Examples include Mike Yastrzemski, Darin Ruf, LaMonte Wade Jr. and Jake McGee.
“It’s kind of like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” said Krukow, referencing the popular 1969 film starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford. “They’d be in some really bad predicament and Sundance would look over and say, ‘You’ll think of something, Butch. You always do.’ We kind of feel that way about Farhan Zaidi. He’ll think of something.”
3. Rodon’s an artist
Free agent pickup Carlos Rodon has impressed witnesses with his electric ensemble of pitches. The Giants believe he can improve upon his 2021 numbers with the White Sox (13-5, 2.37 ERA, 185 strikeouts in 132 2/3 innings).
“I think he could win a Cy Young Award with his stuff,” radio talk show host and ex-pitcher Bill Laskey said.
Why they’ll dive
1. History
Winning 100 games or thereabouts doesn’t guarantee success the following year. Check Giants history for proof. The still-legendary 1962 team, which cruised to a 103-62 mark with future Hall of Famers Orlando Cepeda, Juan Marichal, Willie Mays, Willie McCovey and Gaylord Perry in tow, tumbled to 88-74 the following year. The 1993 and 2003 Giants, who finished 103-59 and 100-61, respectively, checked in at 55-60 and 91-71 in their succeeding years.
2.Offense
Sustaining offense could be an issue. Buster Posey retired following last season. Kris Bryant fled to Colorado in free agency. Longoria is sidelined for six weeks by an injured right index finger. That doesn’t count the knee injuries that are nagging Belt and Wade. “Their offense went back a step,” Laskey said.
3. Paging Joey Bart
It’s up to Bart. This will turn into an asset if Bart, Posey’s highly touted successor behind the plate, can deliver on his promise. Right now, he’s a question mark.
“Early success will give him early confidence, and then everything else, we hope, falls into place,” Krukow said.
Defense is Bart’s top priority, as is the case with every catcher. But he’ll likely feel better about handling the pitching staff if he’s handling the bat capably.
“If you’re swinging the bat, you’re a better defensive player,” Krukow said. You’re not distracted on the field by thoughts of your swing. You’re thinking about nothing but defense.”
Chris Haft is a longtime Bay Area baseball writer who covers the Giants for The Examiner.
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https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/endorsement-gavin-newsom-the-clear-and-only-choice-for-california-governor/
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By The Examiner Editorial Board
With Gov. Gavin Newsom running virtually unopposed in 2022, it would be silly to pretend his reelection is in question. He crushed last year’s recall election, handily defeating a circus parade of wannabes like Larry Elder, Caitlyn Jenner and a guy who roamed the state with a rented Kodiak bear.
This year’s “candidates” are even more obscure and unimpressive. Not one formidable person opted to run against Newsom by the state’s March 11 filing deadline. Instead, his opposition is a joke slate of third-rate publicity hounds and people who apparently get a kick out of seeing their names printed on ballots.
The most notable thing about Sen. Brian Dahle, the Republican standard-bearer, is that he’s a Donald Trump supporter who has refused to get the COVID vaccine. Other than that, he’s a termed-out legislator with nothing better to do than run a hopeless campaign.
Dahle’s laughable candidacy is testament to how far the California GOP has fallen. A party that once produced presidents can now muster nothing better than a pro-Trump anti-vaxxer with no chance. California Republicans have abdicated their opposition party role, embracing radical Trumpian stances that alienate most voters and risk ceding their side of the ballot to Democrats and/or opportunists in California’s open primary.
This brings us to Michael Shellenberger, a professional attention seeker running for governor (again) in an effort to get on the Fox channel and sell his error-riddled books (his 2018 campaign ended with a ninth place finish). In Shellenberger’s upside-down disinformation universe, climate change is really no cause for concern and Democrats get blamed for everything wrong with society.
Yet Shellenberger’s major accomplishment in electoral politics involved working as an image consultant to socialist Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez. Thanks to the policies of Chávez and his handpicked autocratic successor, Venezuela’s economy cratered, its crime rate soared and its democracy died. Shellenberger is not a serious person, but any journalist choosing to elevate his absurdity should ask how serving disastrous socialist regimes qualifies him for governor.
Like the other two dozen random candidates on the ballot, Dahle and Shellenberger have zero chance of victory. Newsom will win reelection on Nov. 8, 2022.
Voters strongly endorsed Newsom’s steady leadership in last year’s recall election. The only challenge for Newsom now is to make good on the ambitious promises he made when he ran under the slogan of “Courage for a Change” in 2018.
Unfortunately, Newsom’s high hopes were interrupted by the COVID pandemic, which plunged the world into a deadly emergency and made crisis management Newsom’s top concern. Unlike governors in Republican-controlled states, Newsom embraced science and erred on the side of caution, a decision that undoubtedly saved thousands of lives. He also used the crisis as a springboard for action on homelessness, launching ambitious and unprecedented efforts to house the state’s spiraling homeless population.
Upon taking office in 2019, Newsom inherited a state budget that had gone from multibillion-dollar deficits to massive surpluses under Gov. Jerry Brown. Unfortunately, he also inherited a state with social crises that had become so grave after decades of neglect that they make Brown’s celebrated budget bonanzas seem quite small. Homelessness, a rising problem Brown essentially ignored, has now become a top issue for voters who have seen California’s streets fill with tents even as its budget coffers overflow with funds.
Unlike his predecessors, Newsom has taken responsibility for solving homelessness. He’s backed up his promise with an unprecedented investment of $14 billion to create more housing and get people off of the street. This year, he proposed the creation of a new “CARE Court” program to help steer addicted and mentally ill people into housing and treatment – an approach that will presumably come with the resources to provide the required care.
Newsom’s work on homelessness alone would be enough to recommend his reelection, and the success of his governorship depends on the progress California makes on this issue. Yet it is far from the only issue he has tackled as governor.
Despite the pandemic’s disruption, Newsom has mostly delivered on the progressive wish list he vowed to support during his 2018 campaign. He has expanded anti-poverty programs and early childhood education. He has pledged to wean California off of fossil fuels and he moved to ban oil fracking. He supports racial justice, immigrant rights and equality for women and the LGBT community. Through it all, California’s economic growth has continued to outpace other states.
Some criticize Newsom for taking on too many thorny issues at once, but California is a big state with endless challenges. We need a leader unafraid to face them all, and to stand up for California’s values no matter how much political capital it costs.
Some press outlets may wring drama from this dead race by playing up poll gyrations and platforming fools, but most of us had our fill of such ridiculousness during the recall farce. Newsom’s second term essentially began when the recall imploded. There’s no point in pretending otherwise or dragging out the process.
The Examiner Editorial Board enthusiastically endorses Gavin Newsom for governor of California.
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https://www.sfexaminer.com/entertainment/helgi-tomasson-who-transformed-the-s-f-ballet-into-a-world-class-institution-begins-his-long-goodbye/
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From his third-floor office on Franklin Street, past the pink-tutued honey bear artwork by fnnch that graces a window, Helgi Tomasson has a direct view of the War Memorial Opera House (not to mention San Francisco City Hall just beyond it). His balcony overlooks a crosswalk that he has traversed thousands of times over the past three-plus decades, commuting between the building that houses San Francisco Ballet’s administrative facilities as well as dance studios and the 1932 Beaux-Arts landmark venue where he forged his legacy as an innovator.
Tomasson’s 37-year reign as SF Ballet’s artistic director and principal choreographer will conclude at the end of the 2021–22 season, appropriately with a revival of his production of “Swan Lake.” The romantic Tchaikovsky ballet was responsible for one of Tomasson’s most memorable achievements during his tenure and helped transform the company into a world-class institution.
Soon, intensive days filled with casting, classes and rehearsals will give way to a looser, undetermined schedule. “Whatever happens … traveling, I hope,” Tomasson offers when recently asked about post-retirement life. For now, the only concrete plan that he and his wife, Marlene, have entails a trip to Germany to visit their son Kris and two grandchildren, who they haven’t seen in two and a half years. (Another son, Erik, lives locally.)
Tomasson, 79, had already decided to step down from S.F. Ballet when COVID-19 restrictions halted the season in March 2020, and he unexpectedly found more time for personal pursuits, such as reading books by authors from his native Iceland. While the pandemic may not have prompted his decision, it did cause him to postpone retirement so he could help see the company through the period and provide it more time to find his successor as artistic director, which SF Ballet announced in January would be Spanish ballet star Tamara Rojo.
The pandemic also represented the biggest challenge of his career. “It was horrendous to be off work and sheltered in place all those months, with dancers trying to keep their morale up and stay in shape in their apartments,” Tomasson says. “When they were finally allowed to get together in class in our studios, it was only six dancers at a time, masked and 10 to 12 feet apart. It was a logistical nightmare, but we managed to do it. We had class going on all day, and then The City eased restrictions and we could start rehearsing and creating works. That was a wonderful thing, but we did that in pods, which could not mingle.”
Fortunately, S.F. Ballet had a long rehearsal period before it returned to live performances at the War Memorial Opera House in December 2021, and it did so with “Nutcracker,” a work the dancers were extremely familiar with and therefore an ideal opus to reopen with, according to Tomasson.
“To have dancers be off almost two years — that’s a very long time in a dancer’s career, and it’s taken them quite a while to come back,” Tomasson says. “Right now the company is dancing very, very well and I’m happy about that.”
Tomasson found creative opportunity out of the crisis the pandemic brought when, during the company’s division of classes into pods, he conceived “Harmony,” set to music by Jean-Philippe Rameau. Premiering in April as part of this season’s Program 5, it is the last work Tomasson choreographed during his stewardship of S.F. Ballet.
“I wanted to think of this work as something coming out of the pandemic, eventually — and harmony was something we needed to be aware of among ourselves and other people,” he explains. “The music inspired me, and as always, there’s an inspiration I get from working with dancers in the studio.”
“Harmony” is among the 50 ballets Tomasson has choreographed for S.F. Ballet since joining as its artistic director in July 1985, including full-length stagings of “The Sleeping Beauty,” “Don Quixote,” “Romeo & Juliet,” “Nutcracker” and, above all, “Swan Lake,” which in 1988 was his first major production for the company. Upon its opening, the New York Times raved that Tomasson’s “Swan Lake,” “one of the most beautifully designed in recent years, now puts the San Francisco Ballet on the international dance map.” Indeed, the work elevated the company’s global profile and turned it into a touring powerhouse, with performances in ballet hubs such as New York, London, Paris and Copenhagen.
Stepping onto the world stage
Back when he signed his initial three-year contract with S.F. Ballet, it was no doubt unimaginable that he would still hold the post 37 years later. San Francisco, though, proved a tremendous fit for his ambitions.
“It took a lot of hard work, but it was my aim from the beginning to create something here that would be truly remarkable. I think with all the new works I have fostered, and getting incredible choreographers to come work with us, that has made the company, to quote others, the envy of the ballet world,” Tomasson says. “It also took some wonderful dancers I’ve had the opportunity to work with, and the board was very supportive of my artistic vision — I always felt I was given leeway and able to pursue it — and I’m grateful for that.”
Tomasson knows from personal experience the pivotal role dancers play in ballet and the inspiration they provide, as he started his career as a dancer in 1957, joining the Pantomime Theatre in Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens at age 15. He went on to the Joffrey Ballet in 1962 (he met Marlene, a fellow dancer, at the company); then the Harkness Ballet in 1964; and ultimately became a principal dancer at the New York City Ballet in 1970 (he retired in 1985).
Tomasson cites Erik Bruhn, Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov — the last of whom in 1969 won gold for Russia to Tomasson’s silver for the U.S. at the First International Ballet Competition in Moscow — as the three dancers who had the largest impact on his career as a dancer and helped inspire him.
As for the individual who shaped him the most as an artistic director, Tomasson credits Robert Joffrey, who hired him when he was 19 to dance for his then-New York company. “At the time, he was the first director of a ballet company to engage the modern dance community’s choreographers — John Butler, Norman Walker, Anna Sokolow — so I was exposed to a totally different way of moving than I had been trained for, and it was fascinating and challenging,” Tomasson says. “It influenced me as a director of this company to seek new works, new choreographers, respect the old classics.”
Stretching the limits of choreography
Tomasson has collaborated with and commissioned works from several renowned choreographers, including Mark Morris, Alexei Ratmansky, William Forsythe, Christopher Wheeldon, Cathy Marston and Dwight Rhoden.
“Helgi has managed to consistently keep this tradition of making new work, constantly challenging his dancers and pushing them in new directions, and bringing the best from all over the world through these doors,” says Wheeldon, who choreographed “Finale Finale” as a tribute to Tomasson; it premieres in SF Ballet’s Program 6 this season.
Marston’s seductive “Mrs. Robinson” debuted in S.F. Ballet’s Program 1. She points out several attributes that have stamped Tomasson as a great artistic director — and a joy to work with. “Working with Helgi is very liberating; he trusts you and allows you to come into this company and make what’s in your heart and doesn’t interrupt or question you,” Marston says.
Rhoden, whose ballet “The Promised Land” also premieres in Program 6, expands upon the list of kudos for Tomasson. “He’s always 10 steps ahead, a pioneer whose vision is always forward — thinking,” Rhoden says. “That’s how he has transformed this company into the major arts institution that it is. I look to him with the greatest reverence for how he is as a leader and artistic director.”
Tomasson, who is confident that S.F. Ballet made the right choice in Rojo as its next artistic director, will continue to contribute to the company in a few key ways. “I will be involved with the [San Francisco Ballet School Spring] Festival in 2023 because I chose those choreographers, and the board would like me to have the same role I had with Unbound [festival of new works], which is to decide who would be in what program and in what order,” Tomasson says. “And if there are going to be ballets by me performed here, Tamara has indicated to me she would very much like me to be involved with that.”
On April 24, Helgi Tomasson: A Celebration will commemorate his career with performances of ballets he choreographed — and handpicked for the special occasion. But “Swan Lake,” opening on April 29 and featuring his 2009 production, which he considers “more contemporary looking” than his earlier one, resonates with Tomasson like no other work. And it is the most fitting artistic flourish for his farewell.
“It is a beautiful ballet. That music is glorious, and the company dances it very well,” Tomasson says with emotion. “I think it’s probably the most favorite ballet around the world, and we accomplished that the first time in 1988. I was just starting then, so why not finish with it?”
A longer version of this article appeared in the April 2022 issue of the Nob Hill Gazette.
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https://www.sfexaminer.com/entertainment/san-francisco-born-colin-woodell-takes-a-ride-toward-movie-star-a-list-in-ambulance/
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Household name recognition could be coming soon for San Francisco-born actor Colin Woodell, who has landed a sizable role in the new Michael Bay mega-production “Ambulance.”
In the movie, which opens Friday, Woodell plays a rookie EMT named Scott, sharing scenes with the top-billed Eiza González.
González plays his more experienced partner, Cam Thompson, who gets kidnapped by adoptive brothers Will (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) and Danny Sharp (Jake Gyllenhaal) when a bank robbery goes awry. They hijack her ambulance and embark on a chase/escape that lasts for most of the rest of the movie.
Woodell says he did some research on being an EMT, and even tracked one down to interview.
“The reality is that there’s only so much an actor can do, because most of their job is preparation, like cleaning the truck and making sure everything is ready for the day,” he says.
In one of his first scenes, which was also his first day of shooting, Scott and Cam arrive at the scene of a grisly car crash, where a metal post has pierced the torso of a young girl.
“Nothing prepared me,” he says. “When you’re working on a Michael Bay film, there are no floaty devices. You just jump right in. Thank goodness I can drive an ambulance because no one checked. And Michael does that intentionally. He wants to create chaos because it gets captured in the film.”
Speaking via phone, Woodell recently talked about growing up in The City, and acting at a young age while enrolled in the youth program at the American Conservatory Theater.
He performed works by Arthur Miller, and of course “Our Town,” while headquartered at the Children’s Creativity Museum, a.k.a. Zeum, in Yerba Buena Gardens.
“I did ‘Christmas Carol’ a couple of times. That was the pinnacle,” he says.
Those shows were performed on the glamorous stage of the Geary Theater, the young actor intermingling with seasoned professionals as well as MFA students from ACT.
“It was probably a circus for the adults,” Woodell says. “I remember my class came to visit me and see the show for a field trip. They all gave me a standing ovation, and I threw my arms in the air, which is not protocol, and I got a scolding from my teacher.”
The actor attended St. Ignatius College Preparatory before moving to Los Angeles to earn his degree at UCLA and launch his career. His home base and his family are still in the Bay Area, and he says he tries to visit at least once or twice a year, and plans to “have some semblance of a home” in San Francisco someday.
“It’s so weird… the longer I was away from home, the more the Bay Area seems to change and evolve,” he says. “I feel like a lot of the people I knew began to leave. It’s a strange feeling to go home and not have all those people there, and to go down a street and your favorite restaurant isn’t there. But every time I’m home it’s the best feeling in the world, it’s like pressing a reset button.”
According to his Wikipedia page, he is currently “best known” for his role as Rick Betancourt on the TV Series “The Purge” (based on the movie franchise) and for his lead role in the 2018 horror sequel “Unfriended: Dark Web.”
“Those were the types of roles that found me and I found them,” he says. “Acting in the genre is so much fun. It’s taxing, for sure, and putting yourself in dangerous situations is challenging. Coming straight out of drama school, that channel of myself was really accessible.”
However, he confesses he’s not a fan of watching horror films. “I get scared very easily,” he admits.
Another break came when he was cast in the 2020 film “The Call of the Wild,” based on Jack London’s classic novel, alongside Harrison Ford. Woodell found himself starstruck by the living legend.
“You introduce yourself and they say their name, and it’s like… well, yeah,” he laughs. “I shook his hand and said, ‘It was such a pleasure working with you.’ He just had this familiar look in his eye, like, ‘You and me, we get it, but the rest of the world doesn’t.’ He has that charisma.”
On working with Bay, Woodell says, “He beats to his own drum. He was one of the guys; he just wants to talk and hang out and suddenly remembers he’s making a movie. He does everything, and he does it at a pace that I’ve never seen before. He operates the camera. He’s lighting from windows 30 stories up, things so intricate that they’re not on the surface.”
Despite the chaos, he had a great partner in González. Her experience working on Hollywood productions of this size, such as “Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw” and “Godzilla vs. Kong,” was an asset.
“She had some knowledge to share with me along the way. She set the tone for me. She was remarkably thorough. She even went head-to-head with Michael. She’s incredible,” he says.
Bay asked Woodell to improvise some of his dialogue with González. Her character is all business, emotionally distant, while Woodell’s Scott tries to lighten the mood and get to know his partner a little. The result is a terrific onscreen chemistry, and some of the funniest moments in the movie.
Another highlight of the film was getting to work, even briefly, with one of his heroes, Gyllenhaal.
“It’s always a tricky thing working with someone you admire,” he says. “You want to watch them work, and at the same time you’re having an out-of-body experience. He was in the zone and not really taking in anything other than what he was doing in front of him. At one point when we were blocking, I did get the chance to say, ‘Hey. I’m Colin.’”
Woodell did bond with actor Abdul-Mateen, who recently appeared in “Candyman” and “The Matrix Resurrections,” and is also from the Bay Area. He calls Abdul-Mateen “inspirational,” describing how he followed his dream, from being an athlete to secretly taking classes at ACT, and even working in the Mayor’s office for a time.
“We immediately clicked,” he says. “He just had that Bay Area vibe. When you’ve been in L.A. long enough, when you meet someone from the Bay Area, you just bond.”
IF YOU GO:
“Ambulance”
Starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Eiza González, Colin Woodell
Written by Chris Fedak
Directed by Michael Bay
Running time 2 hours 16 minutes
Rated R for intense violence, bloody images and language throughout
Opens Friday, April 8 in San Francisco theaters
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https://www.sfexaminer.com/entertainment/the-man-who-made-norcal-counterculture/
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By Paul Wilner
Special to The Examiner
“He lit a spark,” veteran technology author John Markoff says about Stewart Brand. The indefatigable entrepreneur, best known for launching The Whole Earth Catalog in 1968, has also been at the center of countercultural movements for decades.
The first person believed to use the term “personal computer,” Brand cofounded the pioneering online community The Well and CoEvolution Quarterly, which featured contributions from Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry. More recently, his Long Now Foundation tries to separate the signal from the noise and focus on the challenges of the next 10,000 years.
Markoff, a Palo Alto native who retired from the New York Times in 2016 and previously authored “What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer,” remembers visiting the Whole Earth Truck Store in Menlo Park when he was on break from college up in Washington. His new biography, “Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand,” traces the impact of this latter-day Zelig. Many lives, indeed.
“There was a straight line from the Trips Festival” — the famously acid-drenched Longshoreman’s Hall event Brand organized at the behest of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters in 1966 — “to the rise of the Haight,” Markoff says. “But by the time the Summer of Love happened, he was gone. When everybody else showed up, he would take off.” (Brand famously passed out buttons reading, “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole earth yet?” after an acid-induced epiphany on a North Beach rooftop.)
Born in Rockford, Michigan, Brand was a “stereotypical Midwestern kid” who was “completely seduced by California” when his brother enrolled at Stanford, Markoff recalls. Brand followed in his sibling’s footsteps at The Farm, but by his senior year he’d discovered North Beach and fallen in love with its nascent Beat scene as it was morphing into hippiedom. But he was always a searcher.
“What he took away from Buckminster Fuller was that if you want to create social change, train someone to use a new tool,” Markoff says. “The Whole Earth Catalog emerged at the same time Silicon Valley was being formed and had a huge impact on that culture, best expressed by Steve Jobs’ Stanford commencement speech in 2005 (quoting Brand’s aphorism): ‘Stay hungry. Stay foolish.’”
Unlike the tech billionaires he inspired, Brand has never tried to cash in. However, he has enough to keep him afloat on the Sausalito tugboat he shares with his wife, Ryan Phelan.
“Look at the Google founders,” Markoff says. “They were supposed to destroy evil, and wealth corroded them. Apple was about the chemistry between Steve Wozniak, who just wanted to share computer design with his friends, and Jobs, who understood there was a market. That’s the canonical story of Silicon Valley. Stewart was about something else. He’s always been more intellectually curious than people realize.”
Both Markoff and Brand will celebrate the book’s launch on April 7 at 6 p.m., in conversation with Mike Cerre at Sausalito Books by the Bay.
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https://www.sfexaminer.com/findings/california-law-requiring-diversity-on-corporate-boards-struck-down/
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By Erin Griffith
New York Times
A California law requiring diversity on corporate boards of directors has been struck down in a blow to the state’s efforts to address racial and gender disparities in the workplace.
In response to a lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch, a nonprofit conservative advocacy group, Judge Terry Green of Los Angeles County Superior Court on Friday found that the law violated the state constitution.
The law, Assembly Bill 979, went into effect in 2020. It requires publicly traded companies based in California to have board members from underrepresented communities including people of several races and ethnic groups and people who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender. Gov. Gavin Newsom, in signing the bill into law, proclaimed it a victory for racial justice and empowerment.
Judicial Watch’s lawsuit, filed a month after the law was signed, argued that it was unconstitutional because it mandated quotas.
Green did not specify the reasoning for his decision. In one hearing, he described the law as “a bit arbitrary” on which groups it aimed to help, according to Law360.
In a statement after the ruling, Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, decried the law as part of “one of the most blatant and significant attacks in the modern era on constitutional prohibitions against discrimination.”
California has led the country in pushing companies to diversify their top ranks, starting with a 2018 law that required corporate boards have at least one woman. Companies that do not comply face fines.
Since the 2018 law was passed, the number of women on boards more than doubled, according to a report from California Partners Project, a nonprofit focused on gender equity that was founded in part by Newsom’s wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom. Last year, more than half of new board appointees were women, the group said.
In a statement, California Partners Project called the decision “disappointing but not determinative.” The group pointed to studies showing business outcomes were better “when all of our rich talent is represented in positions of leadership” and noted that investors motivated by these outcomes would continue to pressure companies to have diverse boards.
The Securities and Exchange Commission has approved a rule by Nasdaq, set to go in effect this year, that will require companies listed on its exchange to disclose the ethnic and gender makeup of their boards and have at least two “diverse” members or explain why they do not. Other states, including Maryland and New York, have required companies to disclose board diversity statistics, but none have enacted mandatory quotas.
Judicial Watch filed a separate lawsuit over California’s gender diversity law, making the same argument against quotas. It has also pressured the SEC to abandon its approval of diversity rules.
It was not clear whether California would appeal Green’s ruling. The office of the secretary of state did not respond to a request for comment.
The decision was not a complete surprise, and California’s gender diversity law may face a similar fate, said David Bell, co-chair of corporate governance at the law firm Fenwick & West. “Under constitutional principles, the courts have generally been hostile to quotas,” Bell said.
Still, if Green’s decision holds up after any potential appeals, Bell said he did not expect it to change much for companies that are already being pushed to diversify their top ranks.
“It has already set a bench mark for expectations by a lot of different stakeholders — institutional investors, employees, customers,” he said. “The bench mark exists and those expectations are going to carry forth in the world.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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https://www.sfexaminer.com/findings/despite-national-decline-bay-area-gas-prices-remain-at-record-highs/
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While the national average price for a gallon of regular gasoline has decreased by 5 cents to $4.19 over the past week, Bay Area drivers are still paying $1.66 more a gallon than the rest of the country.
According to new data from the Energy Information Administration, an increase in the total domestic gasoline stock combined with a drop in demand helped nudge prices downward, according to AAA. If demand continues to decline as gasoline stocks continue to build, the national average will likely continue to move lower. The U.S. said Thursday it will release 1 million barrels of oil per day from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
As of Sunday, the average price in California for a gallon of regular gas was $5.85.
In the San Francisco Bay Area, current average regular gas prices and month-over-month increases are as follows in these metro areas: Oakland, $5.83, up .85 cents; San Francisco and San Jose, $5.90, up about .85; San Rafael, $5.87, up .78; Santa Cruz, $5.80, up .90 cents; Santa Rosa, $5.86, up .78; Stockton, $5.69, up .89 (though currently ranking as the 10th least expensive region in California); and Vallejo, $5.75, up .80.
The cheapest gas in the state can be found in the Hanford area, $5.57 for a gallon of regular.
The global oil market remains highly volatile, so additional news that threatens supply could put upward pressure on oil prices, AAA said.
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https://www.sfexaminer.com/findings/march-data-showed-promising-growth-for-s-f-economy-but-were-not-back-to-normal-yet/
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By Keith Burbank
Bay City News
A range of economic indicators for San Francisco points to good news and a strong recovery from the effects of the omicron variant of COVID-19, according to a monthly report by the city controller’s office.
Good news came in the form of data from March on job creation, tourism, housing, office attendance and among other indicators, new business formation.
But San Francisco’s chief economist Ted Egan was real about the state of the economy.
“I don’t think the good economic news in our March report changes the fact that San Francisco still has a long way to go in its economic recovery. Our job creation, tourism, and housing are all moving in the right direction. But they are still well below where we were before the pandemic, and far behind where comparable cities are.”
The San Francisco metro area added 12,300 jobs in February, more than half of which was in the leisure and hospitality sector, a sector hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. Unemployment was at 3 percent, the lowest rate for the pandemic era.
The number of housing units permitted jumped again. San Francisco permitted about 325 units in January, up from fewer than 200 in October and fewer than 50 in November 2020.
A few new businesses opened at the beginning of the year in the neighborhood services classification, which includes equipment repair, dry cleaning, and among many other things, pet care services.
Local travel is recovering but residents are still cautious about getting out, according to the controller’s office. Weekly hotel occupancy topped 50 percent in mid-March in San Francisco, only the second time that’s happened since the pandemic began.
But the city is still behind other leading destinations when it comes to hotel revenue recovery.
Office attendance continues to recover sharply since the beginning of the year and from April 2020 when it was below 10 percent.
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https://www.sfexaminer.com/findings/mass-shooting-in-sacramento-marks-californias-12th-this-year/
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The shooting of 15 people, six of them fatally, in Sacramento early Sunday morning is the 12th mass shooting in California this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
There have not been any mass shootings in the Bay Area so far this year. The last of note to occur was the San Jose VTA rail yard attack in May of 2021 that left 10 people dead.
All told in 2021 there were 49 mass shootings in California, 15 of which were in the San Francisco Bay Area, with Oakland recording the most violence of any one city, with 46 people shot, five of them fatally.
The organization, which collects data on gun violence from law enforcement, media, government and commercial sources, defines a mass shooting as four or more individuals shot or killed in a single event, not including the shooter.
According to the Sacramento Police Department, the shooting occurred at 10th and J streets just two blocks from Capitol Mall. No further details are yet available.
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https://www.sfexaminer.com/findings/oakland-man-charged-with-selling-fentanyl-and-meth-in-the-tenderloin/
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A federal judge charged an Oakland man Friday with allegedly selling fentanyl and methamphetamine in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District.
The charges against 26-year-old Oakland resident Jose Alvarado were announced Friday in a news release from U.S. Attorney Stephanie M. Hinds and Drug Enforcement Administration Special Agent in Charge Wade R. Shannon.
Prosecutors allege Alvarado engaged in four transactions selling drugs to three separate undercover law enforcement officers between November 2021 and February 2022.
The charges include two counts of distribution — one of five or more grams of methamphetamine and the other 40 or more grams of fentanyl — each carrying a penalty of a minimum of five years in prison and minimum of four years of supervision following prison.
The news release pointed out that the charges contained in the criminal complaint are only allegations. As in any criminal case, the defendant is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty in a court of law.
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https://www.sfexaminer.com/findings/s-f-s-emergency-psych-unit-faces-dire-conditions/
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Nurses in San Francisco’s primary emergency mental health care unit say they are vastly overwhelmed, creating a bottleneck in The City’s efforts to provide appropriate treatment and urgent care for individuals in a mental health crisis.
“We are short-staffed every day,” said Shamideh Engel, a registered nurse in the Psychiatric Emergency Services (PES) unit at San Francisco General Hospital. “We are asked to work a 16-hour double shift and come back the next day.”
Since May 2020, the PES unit at SF General has been on what’s known as “condition red,” meaning patients who would otherwise be sent directly to the unit are rerouted to the emergency room, where they must first get tested for COVID. Condition red is also an indicator used during and prior to the pandemic to indicate when the unit has reached maximum capacity.
Nurses in the psychiatric unit say the reality on the ground is dire. The unit’s 19 beds are typically filled and psychiatric patients will often end up waiting for hours in the ER, where they sit alongside people experiencing all kinds of medical emergencies.
“We have a bunch of psych emergency patients who need care, and when we are at capacity, they are held up in the ER. That forces the ER to go on diversion sooner,” said Joseph Hunter Rose, a registered nurse who works in the psychiatric emergency unit at SF General. Diversion occurs when the emergency room reaches capacity and ambulances and other emergency responders are redirected to other facilities. “It’s a whole hospital impact when we are at capacity.”
PES is the only acute hospital unit in San Francisco that provides 24-hour psychiatric emergency services. Patients arrive through a number of channels. This includes self-referral and 5150 psychiatric holds, where an adult experiencing a mental health crisis is involuntarily detained for a 72- hour psychiatric hospitalization. Patients may also arrive by way of The City’s street crisis response team, launched in 2020 as an alternative to policing to respond to mental health and substance use crises in San Francisco.
Help on the way?
More than 200 health care workers, including pharmacists and behavioral health clinicians, recently have been hired to focus on the rising challenge of supporting people experiencing homelessness, mental illness and substance use disorder. The hiring spree is part of Mental Health SF, the landmark mental health legislation passed in 2019 that aims to overhaul how The City’s mental health system works.
“We are thrilled to welcome in so many new people and see such energy and enthusiasm to better the health and well-being of San Franciscans,” said Dr. Hillary Kunins, director of Behavioral Health Services. “We have staffed up to a level that can begin to address the scale of need we see in our communities around mental health and substance use. The City has focused many resources toward addressing these critical needs, and now we have new staff members to join us in making it happen.”
Many of the recent hires will staff the Tenderloin Linkage Center, which opened in fall under an emergency declaration and aims to connect individuals with social and housing programs, food and hygiene services, as well as referrals to substance use disorder treatment.
In theory, more health care workers outside of the emergency room could help cut down on the number of hospital visits by supporting people who are at risk of a mental health crisis before it escalates to the emergency level.
Still, the nursing staff at S.F. General said there is a need for more support. The new hires will expand the behavioral health staff in the Tenderloin and other parts of The City but will not be deployed directly to PES, according to the Department of Public Health.
Negotiations are now underway between hospital employers and SEIU 1021, the union that represents thousands of San Francisco city workers including hospital staff. Many nurses are calling for more streamlined hiring processes for temporary health care workers who have stepped in to relieve staffing gaps throughout the pandemic.
It’s often faster to hire and onboard temporary nurses, often called traveler nurses, but that class of health care workers does not receive the same benefits and union representation as their full-time peers.
“The travelers are nice, they give us a buffer for a short amount of time. But when their contract ends, we are back to where we were before,” Rose said. “Systems can change overnight; we saw that in the pandemic. And we need to hire more full-time staff. It will benefit not only the unit but the patients in the long run.”
During 2020-21, there were 4,665 visits to PES, according to a spokesperson for the Department of Public Health. The unit’s bed capacity is currently at 19, just a slight dip from the 20 before the pandemic, which was set to allow for social distancing during the pandemic.
“In many cases, patients are seen by a psychiatrist in the emergency department and are assessed and treated without needing a visit to PES,” public health officials said. “Patients do wait in the emergency department for space to open up, but generally patients are able to access PES as soon as they have completed COVID screening or any needed medical assessment/treatment in the emergency department.”
Specialized care
In the emergency room at S.F. General, where psychiatric patients are rerouted for COVID testing, staffing is so low that nearly half of the available 60 beds are not activated on a typical day, according to Heather Bollinger, a registered nurse in the emergency department.
The emergency room backup then creates longer wait times for all kinds of urgent care needs, such as a broken arm or severe illness, and creates cramped emergency rooms among sick families, patients experiencing mental health crises and more.
Diverting ambulances to other facilities helps reduce patient overflow. But it also can mean patients may end up at facilities less equipped to handle the kind of mental and behavioral health issues that people come to PES with, Engel said.
Conditions and challenges patients arrive with include risk of suicide, severe depression or an intent to harm themselves or others. Some patients need help getting back on medication, and many individuals who come also struggle with substance use disorder, homelessness or both.
In recent years, methamphetamine has been one of the most common substances found among patients admitted to PES, Engel said.
“When I first started, alcohol was the number one problem,” said Engel, who has worked in the department for about 12 years. “I’m seeing a lot more meth now. People are self-medicating with meth, it’s easy to obtain in The City and it’s easy to use.”
A large portion of patients who make it to PES experience drug-induced psychosis.
Almost half (47%) of patient visits to PES from 2017-18 were related to methamphetamine use, according to a 2019 report from the Department of Public Health. The vast majority (89%) of patients who had at least eight psychiatric holds, also known as 5150 holds, had used only methamphetamine and about 25% used methamphetamine mixed with opioids, cocaine or alcohol.
Among the 98 overdose deaths that occurred in San Francisco between January and February this year, fentanyl, methamphetamine and cocaine were the most commonly found substances, according to data from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.
Short staffing also poses a physical risk to hospital workers.
“About monthly, we have to hit the panic button where we are extremely scared and (law enforcement) has to come in,” said Engel.
Rose echoed many of Engel’s experiences.
“With this demographic — people who are marginally housed and/or struggle with substance abuse — they need those clinicians who can go above and beyond,” Rose said. “When we don’t have adequate staffing, we’re just trying to keep our head above water in our shift.”
Despite the staffing challenges, both nurses said they are hopeful conditions can improve.
“My co-workers are family and we go through emotional things throughout the day. I wouldn’t want to work anywhere else, especially because of my co-workers,” Rose said. “Nurses are really special people. They take on these stresses and support each other.”
sjohnson@sfexaminer.com
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https://www.sfexaminer.com/findings/tent-dwellings-are-down-in-the-tenderloin-but-rising-across-the-city/
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As the number of tents were taken down in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood during Mayor London Breed’s recent emergency declaration, sidewalk dwellings increased overall across San Francisco, new city data show.
The collective data paints a complicated picture of whether or not the emergency initiative is making good on its goals, or just shuffling homelessness to other parts of The City.
From June 2021 to March 2022, tents in the Tenderloin decreased by about 55%, going from 77 to 35, according to The City’s data dashboard on the Tenderloin Emergency Initiative. Meanwhile, the total number of tents in San Francisco increased by 55% over the same time period, going from a total of 387 structures in June 2021 to 601 in March 2022.
As of March 2022, 6% of tents citywide are in the Tenderloin, down from 20% last summer.
The results largely reflect a doubling down of operations in the Tenderloin to address homelessness, particularly under Breed’s 90-day Tenderloin Emergency Initiative, which allowed The City to waive certain government rules and implement a series of initiatives aimed at reducing crime, homelessness, overdoses and other challenges. But broader factors contributing to homelessness — racial and economic disparity, cost of living, and access to healthcare and high-paying jobs — have not budged.
“In the background of the Tenderloin effort is a brutal reality that outside of San Francisco in our region and our world, the factors that lead to homelessness are increasing,” said Sam Dodge, Director of the Healthy Streets Operations Center, which organizes encampment clearings and attempts to move people living on the street into shelters.
Nearly 540 individuals have been placed in temporary shelters during the emergency initiative, the dashboard data show. And 84 people experiencing homelessness were placed into longer-term housing, according to The City’s dashboard.
Still, many individuals living in encampments that get cleared must simply relocate if housing offers do not match their needs, such as having a pet or medical needs, or relocation offers may be scant to begin with. In those situations, a person might simply move to another part of the city or even just a few blocks away after a tent encampment is cleared.
“It’s been a long game of sidewalk shuffling folks,” said Carlos Wadkins, human rights organizer for the Coalition on Homelessness in San Francisco. “If there is an abundance of resources and people can move into housing, you see actual change. But when people move from block to block, you’re not going to see these numbers change.”
While a part of keeping sidewalks accessible, breaking up encampments can often be traumatizing and destabilizing for those living on the street. Reports have shown that when clearing encampments, individuals may lose items like medication, wheelchairs or other important personal items.
“We are placing hundreds of people into life-changing programs. Oftentimes these are people who have been out for a long time on the streets. But sometimes they go from neighborhood to neighborhood,” said Dodge. “It’s not our intention to simply dislocate people from one neighborhood to the next.”
Counting tents provides only a limited window into the scale and types of homelessness in San Francisco by focusing only on its most visible extremes. Other individuals who experience homelessness may not be able to afford a tent, reside in cars or temporary shelters, or stay with friends and family.
San Francisco has more than 8,000 individuals experiencing homelessness in 2019, according to the most recent Point-In-Time count, a biannual survey of the city’s homeless population. Many homelessness experts believe that number likely grew during the pandemic.
Tents are nevertheless one metric by which The City measures its housing crisis and provides a window into understanding street homelessness and other challenges that often intersect, such as the overdose epidemic that is disproportionately impacting unhoused populations in San Francisco. Between 2020 and 2021, overdose deaths skyrocketed to more than 1300 in San Francisco.
The operation brought together the Department of Emergency Management, Department of Public Health, police, the Mayor’s Office and many other emergency responders and nonprofit social service providers, who put their heads together to address challenges in the Tenderloin.
The operation led to the creation of the Tenderloin Linkage Center, a homeless services and navigation center where guests can get a hot meal, do laundry, take a shower or just take respite in a safe space. The facility also assists with signing up for programs like Medi-Cal, medication assistance and referrals to other health programs. More than 50 overdoses have been reversed at the center from January 17 to March 27, according to a data dashboard tracking the initiative’s progress. Very few individuals have been placed in addiction treatment directly through the facility, however.
At a recent public hearing probing the Tenderloin plan, several supervisors including Matt Haney, whose district includes the Tenderloin neighborhood, praised the Linkage Center for meeting basic needs but questioned the initiative’s overall efficacy. Some supervisors from other districts meanwhile said they have seen conditions deteriorate in their jurisdictions while attention and resources, such as police, have been focused on the Tenderloin.
“Since (the Tenderloin emergency initiative) started, conditions in the Mission have gone down to a degree that I haven’t seen since I started as a supervisor. I’m at a loss and I’m a little frustrated,” Supervisor Hillary Ronen said in the meeting. “Our housed residents and our unhoused residents are suffering.”
The Tenderloin historically has had the highest concentration of homelessness, as well as challenges related to drug use and dealing, compared with other parts of The City.
Housing and homelessness advocates are now wary that a similar trend of reshuffling people on the street could follow in neighborhoods like the Mission if permanent and supportive housing placements are not prioritized over removing tents.
“We moved people out of the Tenderloin, and they went somewhere else. Where do they go from there?” said Wadkins of the Coalition on Homelessness. “It’s a constant game we will play.”
sjohnson@sfexaminer.com
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https://www.sfexaminer.com/opinion/opinion-is-california-overextending-its-budget/
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By Dan Walters
CalMatters
“Don’t bite off more than you can chew” is one of those old, but valid, aphorisms that people and institutions ignore at their peril.
Most of us know people who have taken on more debt than they can afford or make promises to friends and families that they cannot honor, with adverse human consequences.
Corporations wind up in bankruptcy court when they expand too rapidly or misread markets. That sometimes happens to governments as well, such as the three California cities that have gone bankrupt in recent years by taking on too much debt for projects and benefits that were politically attractive but financially unsustainable.
California’s state government has been on an expansionist binge of late, thanks to a torrent of unanticipated tax revenues and immense amounts of federal aid tied to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Scarcely a week passes without Gov. Gavin Newsom announcing some new program or expansion of an existing program, such as extending health coverage to more undocumented immigrants, increasing slots for pre-kindergarten care and education, and moving mentally ill homeless people into treatment and housing.
There is some financial risk in these expansions. The state is seeing a surge of revenues now, but its finances are dangerously dependent on a relative handful of wealthy taxpayers and even a mild downturn could — as we have often seen in the past — quickly lead to shortfalls.
The promises being made in the expansive services Newsom and the Legislature are launching raise expectations that could turn to dust if the economy turns sour, as it periodically does.
There’s also another aspect that could backfire even if money is not a problem — actually delivering the new services.
Alas, the state’s track record on accomplishing what it promises is not a good one. The managerial meltdowns at the Department of Motor Vehicles and the Employment Development Department attest to that syndrome, as are the state’s numerous high-technology projects that have either failed or become expensive sinkholes.
Capitol politicians have a tendency to enact high-concept “solutions” to perceived problems without fully vetting the capability of delivering or even delving into their performance after the fact.
A prime example of the syndrome is how California has dealt with — or failed to deal with — its immense homeless population, an issue that ranks very high in the public consciousness.
Countless billions of dollars have been spent on multiple approaches, but indications are that the number of people on the streets has continued to increase.
A year ago, the just-retired state auditor, Elaine Howle, issued a highly critical report on California’s efforts, saying “its approach to addressing homelessness is disjointed. At least nine state agencies administer and oversee 41 different programs that provide funding to mitigate homelessness, yet no single entity oversees the state’s efforts or is responsible for developing a statewide strategic plan.”
“As a result,” Howle told the Legislature, “the state continues to lack a comprehensive understanding of its spending to address homelessness, the specific services the programs provide, or the individuals who receive those services.”
Given that, one must wonder whether any of the new programs being rolled out will be any more successful.
How, for instance, will the state deliver more pre-kindergarten care and education if the K-12 system is already many thousands of teachers short? Will extending Medi-Cal health care coverage to more people make any difference when existing recipients already struggle to find doctors? Will there be enough professional staff to handle the mentally ill who would be forced into treatment under Newsom’s “Care Court” plan?
In short, is California continuing to bite off more than it can chew?
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https://www.sfexaminer.com/sports/deep-determined-and-dangerous-why-the-warriors-pose-a-major-threat-in-the-playoffs/
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By John Krolik
Special to The Examiner
With the playoffs looming straight ahead of us, the Warriors showed over the course of a weekend just how dangerous they can be. It’s not just that they won back-to-back games over the Utah Jazz and Sacramento Kings. They showed resilience. They showed depth. Perhaps most importantly, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green put in absolutely monster performances.
Thompson had ended March with an absolute nightmare of a performance against the Phoenix Suns. He shot 5-21 from the field and 1-10 from beyond the arc. He missed wide-open shots. He became visibly frustrated with himself. In what ended up being a four-point loss, Thompson’s woeful shooting night stung that much more.
Fortunately, Thompson showed he has a very short memory. He went for 36 points against the Jazz. He shot 14-28 from the field and 8-17 from beyond the arc. He was comfortable working without the basketball. He swished threes from seemingly impossible angles. When the defense overplayed the three, he curled to the free-throw line area and drained pull-ups with ease. He was absolutely white-hot. Directly after a game where Thompson’s shooting woes gravely hurt the Warriors’ chances in a close loss, his hot shooting was the biggest reason the Warriors were able to surge back from a 20-point deficit against the Jazz.
There are still causes for concern. Klay remains relatively ground-bound. Only one of his 28 shots on Saturday came at the rim, and he failed to get to the free-throw line a single time. It’s no secret why Klay is having trouble exploding to the rim after two major surgeries. His pull-up game is a decent backup option. Still, it would help the Warriors if Klay could find ways to get himself to the rim and the line (where he shoots a tidy 91.1%) more often.
Green, for his part, had his best game since returning from injury. He finished with 10 points, nine rebounds, and seven assists. As is always the case, the stats never really tell his story. What’s far more impressive than the numbers he put up (including his first double-digit scoring performance in 2022) is the way he went about doing it. As always, he pulled the strings of the Warriors’ offense in the half-court. He grabbed the ball at the top of the three-point line or in the high post, waited for a teammate to get open, and delivered the ball on time and on target.
What was really promising is that Green started to move in the half-court in a way he hasn’t done much this season, especially since his return. He faked his usual passes and used his dribble to create a better angle for the delivery. He played the give-and-go game. As mentioned above, he wasn’t afraid to call his own number and take the shot himself. All of his baskets came in half-court situations, where Green has been extremely reluctant to shoot all season long. Green was able to use his savant-like basketball IQ in conjunction with more energy and movement. The increase of pressure that combination put on the defense was exponential.
On Sunday, the Warriors showed their depth when they beat the Kings 109-90 the day after beating the Jazz. Thompson understandably had the night off. The Warriors were able to maintain a large lead throughout the game. That meant the Warriors were able to give minutes to players who haven’t been in the rotation much as of late. They didn’t disappoint, and showed how the Warriors have been able to persevere through so many injuries this season.
Against Phoenix and Utah, Jonathan Kuminga played a grand total of nine minutes and didn’t attempt a shot. That would throw most 19-year-olds off their rhythm. Kuminga is not most 19-year-olds. He scored 17 points in 31 minutes against the Kings. He went 2-3 from beyond the arc, which was a good sign after he struggled from distance in March. He even threw in five rebounds and four assists for good measure. Even if Kuminga doesn’t make the playoff rotation when the time comes around, he’s a valuable asset.
In a further testament to team depth, Jordan Poole went for 22 points yet again. Poole scored 12 points on March 1st. Since that day, Poole has yet to score less than 20 points in a game, and has scored 30 or more points five times. For the month of March, he averaged 25.4 points per game on 49.5%/44.4%/89.9% shooting. When Stephen Curry returns, Steve Kerr will have an absolutely ludicrous amount of firepower at his disposal.
Andrew Wiggins, who has struggled since starting the All-Star game, pitched in 25 points, which happens to be his highest total since the All-Star game. Nemanja Bjelica showed off his all-around game with 19 points on 7-11 shooting from the floor and 3-6 shooting from the three-point range to go along with 12 rebounds and six assists.
The Warriors’ stars are rounding back into form. They’re deep. They’re determined. And come the playoffs, that will make them dangerous.
John Krolik is a freelance contributor to The Examiner.
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https://www.sfexaminer.com/sports/who-are-the-best-golfers-in-san-francisco-harding-park-decided/
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By John K. Abendroth
Special to The Examiner
The City crowned its new golf champions over the weekend for the 106th time. For some perspective on the San Francisco City Golf Championships, Woodrow Wilson was president the first year it was played.
Held at TPC Harding Park, the contest involves about 600 players each year, and it’s widely considered one of the longest-running amateur contests in the nation.
In terms of star power, “The City,” as the tournament is affectionately known, has hosted some big names over the years. Famed golfers Juli Inkster, George Archer and Ken Venturi are all past champions. Hall of Famers Tom Watson and Johnny Miller have both played in it, but neither ever won the championship.
This year, 17-year-old Adora Liu from Newark won the women’s championship, outlasting her good friend Olivia Duan in match play. Our new champ didn’t make a single bogey over the 28-hole finals. She plans to play for UC Berkeley in the fall.
On the men’s side, 35-year-old Michael Jensen came out on top with a victory over Kyle Dougherty. Jensen played steady golf, hitting most of the fairways en route to the win. He first played in “The City” some 20 years ago. In the intervening years, he played golf at Cal and went on to to a five-year professional career. Jensen grew up in Los Altos but now lives in San Francisco.
In a fun story that evolved on the final day, Chris Miller, who hails from Discovery Bay, won the senior championship while his daughter Sammie Miller went on to win the Juli Inkster flight, a secondary championship held for women participants. The two wore matching-colored shirts each of their matches and had fun having a photo taken together with their trophies. Sammie is also the reigning champion of the San Francisco City Junior Championship played at historic Lincoln Park.
John K. Abendroth, who is a member of the PGA, is a freelance contributor to The Examiner.
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